NEW YORK, NY.- A long-overlooked painting regarded for decades as the work of Sandro Botticellis studio assistants sold at Sothebys in New York City on Thursday for $45.4 million with fees, kick-starting this years cycle of headline-grabbing prices for trophy artworks at auction.
Now billed as a seminal masterpiece by the Italian renaissance master, Botticellis tempera-on-panel The Man of Sorrows, a solemn half-length depiction of the resurrected Christ, was the standout work in a 55-lot sale of old master paintings and sculpture Thursday. Certain to sell for at least $40 million, thanks to a minimum and prearranged irrevocable bid from a third-party guarantor, the painting attracted two further bidders. The winning bid, which was not the guarantors, was taken by a Sothebys old masters specialist, Elisabeth Lobkowicz, in New York. The contest took six minutes, with the bidders tendering tentative $100,000 increments.
It was the right price for the subject a Christ of Sorrows, said Marco Voena, a partner in the international art dealership Robilant+Voena. It was a difficult period for Botticelli, he added, referring to the fervid religiosity of the artists late works, which some deem as less beautiful.
The Man of Sorrows had last come up for auction, cataloged as a Botticelli, in 1963, when it sold for a relatively modest $26,000. Ronald Lightbown, the leading Botticelli scholar of the time, later listed the painting among workshop and school pictures in his 1978 complete catalog of the artists works. It was grouped among late workshop products from the circle of Botticelli in Frank Zöllners 2005 monograph on the artist.
But in 2009, this long-ignored painting, from an unnamed family collection, was included as an autograph-status work in the exhibition Botticelli: Likeness, Myth, Devotion, at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.
Bastien Eclercy, the Städels curator of Italian, French and Spanish paintings before 1800, wrote in the exhibition catalog that the rediscovered painting from a private collection not only represented an important new example of Botticellis late period, but also added a striking facet to our understanding of the depiction of Christ in the Renaissance.
The attribution was endorsed by Laurence Kanter, chief curator of European art at Yale University Art Gallery, and Keith Christiansen, former chair of the department of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, according to Sothebys.
Sothebys describes The Man of Sorrows as a late work by Botticelli from about 1500, a period when, according to Giorgio Vasaris 1550 Lives of the Artists, the Florentine painter fell under the influence of the fire-and-brimstone preaching of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, becoming an adherent of the preachers sect. Works from Botticellis later period have been viewed by modern scholars as being imbued with an intense religious fervor. Sothebys composition is notable for its halo of grieving angels circling the risen Christs thorn-crowned head.
The reattributed painting, billed by Sothebys as the defining masterpiece of Botticellis late career, was given a global marketing tour with viewings in Los Angeles, London, Dubai and New York. It was hung on its own in sepulchral gloom next to photographs that invited prestigious comparisons with Albrecht Dürers famous Self-Portrait in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and Leonardo da Vincis Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World, which sold for $450.3 million at Christies, a record for any artwork offered at auction.
It proved to be the second big-ticket Botticelli sold by Sothebys in the space of 12 months. Last January, Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel, from the estate of the New York-based real estate magnate and art collector Sheldon Solow, sold for $92.2 million, a record price for both a Botticelli at auction and an old master picture at Sothebys.
Comparing Thursdays sale to the one last January, Fabrizio Moretti, director of the London-based old master dealership Moretti Fine Art Ltd., said The Man of Sorrows was very religious, introspective and powerful. The proportion of half the price is about right.
Hugo Nathan, a partner in the London-based art advisers Beaumont Nathan, said he did not recommend The Man of Sorrows to his clients.
It was a huge price, he said. And personally, I didnt love the picture. The hands are so awkward. It wasnt a picture to fire the imagination.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.