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I
n the lead-up to its auction in New York, Sotheby’s
sent a 15th century painting by the early Italian
Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli on a world
tour, traveling from New York to Dubai, London,
and Los Angeles in an effort to drum up interest.
While the painting was in London, a group of
dealers, collectors, and curators who’d gathered to admire
it got to talking: Was the “in excess of $80 million” estimate
reasonable for an exquisitely preserved portrait of a beauti-
ful young man in a sumptuous mauve doublet? Opinions var-
ied to such a degree that an informal wager began. Everyone
wrote down their bet on a piece of paper; the furthest from
the correct price would have to buy the rest of them dinner.
It was a fun idea at first, “but now it’s become a real prob-
lem,” says Jorge Coll, co-chief executive officer of the old mas-
ters gallery Colnaghi, founded in London in the 18th century.
“More people have joined the bet, and now the guy who’s lost
is going to have to pay for an expensive dinner.”
Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel eventually
hammered on Jan. 28 for $80 million. Auction house fees
brought the total to $92.2 million. When this Botticelli was
last available, almost 40 years ago, it sold to the real estate
billionaire Sheldon Solow for about $1.3 million. The auction
yielded his private foundation (Solow died in November) an
almost 7,000% return. The highest public sale of the artist’s
work prior to this was in 2013, when a small painting of the
Madonna sold for $10.4 million.
Coll and his friends weren’t the only ones speculating
about the estimate. Most experts couldn’t agree on what
it was worth, because Sotheby’s valuation was without
precedent. “No Botticelli has sold for anything like this,”
said the dealer Patrick Matthiesen before the sale started.
“I think the price for this picture should be $30 million to
$50 million. Having said that, I don’t dispute for a minute
that it could clear [$80 million] in a moment.”But some dealers argued there actually was a precedent—
it just had nothing to do with Botticelli. The benchmark
for the portrait’s sale, the argument goes, had been set
by other artists— including Jeff Koons’s Rabbit ($91 million
at Christie’s in 2019), a painting of a skull by Jean-Michel
Basquiat ($110.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2017), and, most sig-
nificantly, a painting of Jesus Christ by Leonardo da Vinci.
When Salvator Mundi sold for $450 million at Christie’s
New York in 2017, it became easily the most expensive paint-
ing to ever sell at auction. More than that, though, it was a
lesson to art dealers everywhere: A select group of very, very
wealthy people are willing to pay for the best—or at least,
the best-available—example of an artist’s work, assuming of
course the artist is famous. The only question, then, is how
convincingly sellers can make the case.
“The people at Christie’s who created the [promotional]
video for Salvator Mundi should have won an Oscar,” Coll
says. The video in question, The Last da Vinci: The World Is
Watching, is a four-minute film that shows rapid-fire clips of
people of every age, race, and class staring at the picture,
often weeping—the actual work of art is never
shown. “They took the painting out of the equa-
tion,” Coll says. “When you look at something
like that, it’s the same emotion as when you’re
listening to your national anthem. How can you
value that?”
Christopher Apostle, head of old master paintings
at Sotheby’s, has a slightly different explanation for the
Botticelli’s evaluation, but it still comes back to the notion
that so-called masterpieces are in a class unto themselves. “I
didn’t sort of think, ‘Oh, I can make this into a cultural phe-
nomenon,’” he says, adding that the Leonardo sale was proof
of nothing more than “at auction, sometimes things happen.”
Instead, Apostle says, “you’ve got to look at the whole
panoply of what a masterpiece is, and I don’t think there’s a
difference between a masterpiece by Basquiat or Rembrandt
or Botticelli.” In other words, Young Man Holding a Roundel
shouldn’t be valued against other Botticellis; rather, it
should be valued as the best possible version of a work of
art by a superstar artist. “I’ve always felt that this was a pic-
ture that’s in its own category,” Apostle says. “I looked at
Picasso and Basquiat as much as I did any other old master.”
That might sound like hype, but there’s almost unanimous
consensus that this Botticelli is, in fact, the finest portrait still
in private hands. “Without any doubt it’s the best old master
painting to come to market in the last 10 years, and for me,
past 20 years,” says Fabrizio Moretti, founder of the Moretti
Gallery in London. “I deal in this period, and it’s so rare to
find a painting [like this] in great condition.”
Most recently, Carlo Orsi, a dealer from Milan, brought
another Botticelli portrait to the 2019 Frieze Masters art fair
in London. Valued at about $30 million, the work “was a very
well-known portrait, full of history,” Orsi says, but he notes
that the Spanish government had it listed as a work of cultural
interest, meaning it couldn’t leave the country for long. Given PREVIOUS PAGE: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. HUMMINGBIRD CAY: DAMIANOS SOTHEBY’S INTERNATIONAL REALTY. BITCOIN, BIRKIN: GETTY IMAGES. OTHERS: COURTESY COMPANIESART Bloomberg Pursuits February 8, 2021“It’s the same
emotion as when
you’re listening
to your national
anthem. How can
you value that?”