An exceptional early work by Sandro Botticelli, “The Virgin and Child Enthroned”, dated around 1470, illuminated this evening’s Sotheby’s auction in London: eight bidders – some of them traditionally collectors of contemporary art – chased the painting in an eight-minute competition until it reached a final selling price of 10 million pounds (around 12.7 million euros), well above the estimate of 2-3 million pounds. This evening’s result sets a new benchmark for an early work by the Florentine Renaissance artist at auction and also ranks among the highest prices ever achieved for a work by Botticelli.
Purchased by Lady Wantage in 1904, the painting depicting the Virgin and Child by the young Botticelli remained in the same family collection for over a century. Little studied and largely known only from black-and-white photographs, the work had been lost sight of, its location often misidentified, and largely overlooked in more recent monographs and exhibitions. The composition of the work presents strong similarities with Botticelli’s altarpiece of Sant’Ambrogio from around 1470, now preserved in the Uffizi, considered not only the artist’s first large-scale painting but also one of his first altarpieces. Made on a small scale, this painting was likely intended for a patron seeking an intimate altarpiece for private devotion.
At the beginning of the 19th century she was housed in the Convent of San Giuliano in Florence and from there she moved to a small chapel attached to a group of farmhouses in a town near Florence, where she was venerated in a convalescent home for the sick. It then passed to the family of Giovanni Magherini Graziani. The painting was sold by the celebrated Italian dealer Elia Volpi to Harriet Sarah Jones Loyd, Lady Wantage in May 1904 and has remained in her family ever since. Letters relating to the purchase of the work have also been preserved in the family archive, which shed light on the negotiations between Lady Wantage, her intermediary Sir Thomas Gibson Carmichael and Volpi.
Alex Bell, Sotheby’s Global Co-President for Old Masters, commented at the conclusion of the sale: “In 1904, a charismatic collector named Lady Wantage spent several months negotiating the purchase of this extraordinarily beautiful and contemplative early work by Botticelli. After finally securing the painting, she took it home, where it has since been admired by her and her descendants. Unseen in public for nearly a century, it has escaped the attention of the field’s leading scholars. Now, finally, this exceptional painting has resurfaced in the public arena and captured the attention of all who saw it. Their enthusiasm was evident in the sales room tonight, when the painting effortlessly surpassed its high estimate, establishing a new reference price for an early work by one of the greatest masters of the Italian Renaissance”.