Renowned Renaissance artist, Sandro Botticelli, who is possibly best known for creating the Birth of Venus, has been thrusted into the spotlight this Winter. A portrait painted by the Renaissance master is set to hit the auction block this coming January, and may become one of the world’s most impressive sale records for a Renaissance work. Some experts believe Sandro Botticelli’s portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel may fetch close to $100 million (USD).
Offered by Sotheby’s, Young Man Holding a Roundel is being compared by the auction house to some of the 20th and 21st centuries most impressive auction lots, including “Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (sold in 2006 for $87.9 million) and Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet (sold in 1990 for $82.5 million).” The work will be the highlight of Sotheby’s annual Masters Week sales series in New York during January 2021. Botticelli is renowned for exemplifying the human figure as the center of Renaissance art, particularly with the Birth of Venus. Young Man Holding a Roundel is no exception to this legacy, and stands as a masterpiece of Renaissance art in and of itself. The works masterful execution combined with dramatic colors and formidable yet atypical simplicity leave it in a unique class of its own.
“In the popular imagination, no other painter evokes the golden age of the Florentine Renaissance more powerfully than Sandro Botticelli. His Birth of Venus and Primavera are among the most famous works in the canon of Western Art. His nymphs, goddesses, Madonnas and saints populate our imagination as representatives of the rebirth of science, art, and literature in a city that laid the foundation for the modern world. It is in his portraits, however, that Botticelli most clearly opens a window onto the world of Renaissance Florence – never more so than in Young Man Holding a Roundel, a painting that encapsulates the intellectual, courtly and humanistic virtues that define the Italian Renaissance.” Stated Christopher Apostle, Head of Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings Department, New York.
Over the last few decades, Young Man Holding a Roundel has been displayed most notably at the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. According to Sotheby’s, the painting was first documented in the collection of Lord Newborough at Caernarfon in Wales. It is believed to have been acquired by the Lord’s ancestor Sir Thomas Wynn, 1st Lord Newborough (1736-1807), who resided in Tuscany for sometime. In 1935 the work was sold by a London art dealer to a private collector, whose heirs in turn sold the work to its present owner for £810,000 in 1982.
Images Courtesy of: Sotheby’s
