Botticelli masterpiece ‘Man of Sorrows’ could fetch over $40 million at a Sotheby’s auction

Uncommon “autograph”-quality work by the Early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli have grow to be the artwork commerce’s equal of London buses. You wait and wait and wait, then 4 of them arrive one after the opposite.

And now Sotheby’s has introduced that it is going to be promoting “The Man of Sorrows,” a half-length panel portray of the resurrected Christ, thought thus far from round 1500, which the public sale home ambitiously claims is “the defining masterpiece of Botticelli’s late profession.”

Scheduled to be auctioned in New York in January 2022, the Botticelli will probably be unveiled in Hong Kong earlier than a world tour with viewings in Los Angeles, London and Dubai. The portray is definite to promote, courtesy of a pre-auction monetary assure, and is estimated to boost greater than $40 million.

“The Man of Sorrows,” like “Younger Man Holding a Roundel,” is an attributional improve. The portray, owned by an American collector, final appeared at public sale 1963, when it offered for the comparatively modest value of £10,000 ($13,600 at present). It was listed among the many “workshop and college photos” in Ronald Lightbown’s seminal 1978 catalog of Botticelli’s works, which means it was thought to have been created by the painter’s college students or followers.

A better view of Sandro Botticelli’s “The Man of Sorrows.” Credit score: Courtesy Sotheby’s

However now, following its inclusion within the 2009-2010 exhibition “Botticelli: Likeness, Fable, Devotion” on the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and a subsequent in-person viewing, “The Man of Sorrows” has been hailed by Laurence Kanter, the chief curator of European artwork at Yale College Artwork Gallery, as an autograph-quality masterpiece of the artist’s late interval, based on a Sotheby’s catalog.

The upgraded attribution for “The Man of Sorrows” has additionally been endorsed by Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the division of European work on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York, based on Sotheby’s. Nevertheless, Scott Nethersole, a specialist Botticelli scholar who’s Reader in Italian Renaissance Artwork on the Courtauld Institute in London, stays much less satisfied of the portray’s totally autograph standing.

‘Crossover image’

Botticelli’s late non secular work from the 1490s onwards are imbued with an otherworldliness that displays the fervid “bonfire of vanities” preaching of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who briefly grew to become the de facto ruler of Florence, earlier than being publicly executed in 1498. Vasari, in his “Lives of the Artists,” from 1550, wrote that Botticelli grew to become an adherent of Savonarola’s sect, which led him to “abandon portray.” Artwork historians now know that to not be the case. “The Man of Sorrows,” impassively displaying his wounds as a halo of weeping angels holding Devices of the Ardour flutters round his head, has many stylistic similarities with Botticelli’s “Mystic Nativity” within the UK’s Nationwide Gallery, signed and dated 1500.

“This can be a crossover image. It may enchantment to a up to date collector,” mentioned Christopher Apostle, Sotheby’s head of Outdated Grasp work in New York, in a cellphone interview. “I see a robust, stark, in-your-face picture, which appears to be the place we get individuals coming into the market, particularly a giant identify like Botticelli, that all of them know and all love.”

The attract of the Botticelli model is not in query. However how can we be certain this image with a $40 million-plus price ticket is a totally “autograph” work by a Florentine Renaissance artist who ran a busy workshop that made massive portions of spiritual work?

In keeping with Sotheby’s, Lightbown’s 1978 catalogue of Botticelli’s works, written lengthy earlier than tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} may grasp on a single attribution, took a “restrictive” view of the artist’s output and did not think about works that had been collaborations between the mater and his assistants.

Certainly, “Botticelli: Artist and Designer,” at present operating on the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, explores how the artist’s workshop was a “laboratory of concepts,” based on the museum’s web site, making work that had been just about all, to various levels, collaborative — even within the case of masterworks similar to “La Primavera.”

Botticelli’s celebrated portrait, “La Bella Simonetta,” from Frankfurt’s Städel Museum, is likely one of the star displays of this Paris present. Catalogued by Lightbown as a chunk by the painter’s workshop, that is these days proudly displayed by the German museum as an autograph-quality spotlight of its assortment.