A panel painting attributed to Sandro Botticelli will be auctioned on January 27 in New York with a 'surprise': the "Christ of Sorrows" by the Florentine Renaissance painter hides under the image of Jesus with the symbols of the Passion, that of a Madonna and Child.
The painting has a $ 40 million guarantee and will be sold at Sotheby's on the same evening as a recently rediscovered "Portrait of a Gentleman" by Andrea del Sarto and two works by Artemisia Gentileschi from the collection of the Geneva banker JE Safra.
Botticelli should be the star of the auction a year and a day after, again at Sotheby's, an anonymous Asian collector won, paying over 92 million dollars, a "Portrait of a Gentleman with Tondo" by the same author. The "Man of Sorrows" from the late January sale has remained in private hands since the 19th century when it was recorded in the collection of Adelaide Kemble Sartoris, a celebrated English opera singer. Adelaide's great-great-granddaughter, Lady Cunynghame, sold it at auction in 1963 for ten thousand pounds and since then it has remained in the collections of the current owners who have lent it only once, for the Botticelli exhibition at the Städel in Frankfurt in 2009. -2010.
After the sale, the painting is already booked for a Botticelli exhibition in Minneapolis together with other works by the artist from the Uffizi. The image of the Madonna, hidden between the layers of paint, came to light by examining the table in infrared rays. According to Chris Apostle, the head of Sotheby's for Renaissance and Baroque paintings, the iconography is that of the "Madonna of Tenderness", inspired by Greek-Byzantine icons, in which the Virgin holds the head of baby Jesus cheek to cheek against his. The poplar wood of the table was the standard in Renaissance Florence, a material that was nevertheless precious for artists: therefore, if on a table there was an unsuccessful sketch of a routine composition, no one would have wanted to throw it away.The new overpainted image of the "Christ of Sorrows" (the crown of thorns and the ropes of arrest as symbols of the Passion) reflects the climate of religious fervor of the mid-millennium in the Florence of the Dominican friar Gerolamo Savonarola: the work was painted around 1500 when the apocalyptic predictions after the expulsion of the Medici and the hopes of personal salvation had reached particularly intense levels. Despite the record sale of a year ago (that painting came from the collection of magnate Sheldon Solow, one of the great builders of skyscrapers in New York, and the price paid was the highest in the history of Old Masters auctions after the Salvator Mundi of Leonardo), Botticelli's works from any period are extremely rare on the market,particularly those of recent years: according to Sotheby's only three paintings from this period (post 1492) still remain in private hands.