LONDON — Sandro Botticelli, who died five centuries ago, is best known for his “Spring” and “Birth of Venus” paintings, which help draw more than two million visitors a year to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. His works are not generally expected to be found outside the world’s major museums.
Yet a portrait painted by the Renaissance master has just cropped up on the international art market. With an asking price of $30 million, it is set to be the lone work at the booth of Trinity Fine Art, a London-based gallery, at this year’s Frieze Masters fair from Thursday to Sunday.
The portrait, “Michele Marullo Tarchaniota” (circa 1497), shows a dark-haired man dressed in black who casts a sideways glance at the viewer. Marullo was a soldier and poet of Greek origin who was close to the Medici dynasty of bankers and arts patrons — and was celebrated and admired in late 15th-century Florence. He drowned while crossing a river after visiting a fellow scholar.
No one knows for sure how his portrait came about: whether Botticelli painted it during Marullo’s lifetime, or whether it was posthumously commissioned by his widow, Alessandra Scala. Yet it is distinctive enough to have been included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2011-12 exhibition “The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini.”
“We wanted it because it is, quite simply, a marvelous picture — despite the fact that it has not come down to us in the ideal kind of condition one would hope,” Keith Christiansen, chairman of the European paintings department at the Met, wrote in an email.
“Botticelli gives us a truly psychological portrait of one of the most fascinating humanists of the 15th century.”
The portrait also provides “a different sense” of the work of Botticelli, who is more commonly known as a painter of female figures or of “mystic, Dante-esque visions,” Mr. Christiansen added.
Painted with egg tempera on a wooden panel, the Marullo portrait was transferred to canvas in 1864, according to the Met catalog, and made smaller: about 2.75 inches were trimmed from either side of it, leaving a slightly slimmer version of Botticelli’s original composition.
A few weeks before the Frieze Masters opening, Trinity Fine Art organized a viewing of the painting in a London storage facility. Ultraviolet light revealed that parts of the subject’s hair and clothing had undergone restoration.
The list of the portrait’s prior owners is a Who’s Who of European royalty. It was once the property of Auguste de Beauharnais, whose father was the stepson of Napoleon. The portrait later entered the collections of the son-in-law of Czar Nicholas I of Russia.
About a century ago, it was bought by the prominent Catalan politician and arts patron Francesc Cambó i Batlle. The family has owned the portrait ever since. It was recently on long-term loan to the Prado Museum in Madrid.
The Italian gallerist Carlo Orsi, owner of Trinity Fine Art, said he was approached by a member of the family a year or so ago and asked about the possibility of selling the work. There were 14 heirs, he was told, and it was impossible to slice up the painting into equal parts.
Mr. Orsi works with prominent family collections in Italy. He recently showed a bronze bust of Pope Urban VIII by Bernini at the Florence International Biennial Antiques Fair. Previously, he sold Pontormo’s “Portrait of a Gentleman With a Book” to the businessman and collector Francesco Federico Cerruti, who died in 2015 and bequeathed his collection to the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy.
The Botticelli was an offer Mr. Orsi could not refuse. “I thought to myself, ‘When will I ever be handling another Botticelli?’” he said. “This kind of opportunity comes up only once in your life.”
The gallerist said he initially considered showing the painting alongside other works at his booth at the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He soon realized that it would draw all the attention and prevent him from finding buyers for any of the other objects he had for sale.
That was when he decided on Frieze Masters, a fair with a strong focus on modern art, where the Botticelli was sure to stand out. And he decided to dedicate an entire booth to the portrait.
Mr. Orsi said the market for old masters had received a shot in the arm from the sale in November 2017 of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” for $450.3 million at Christie’s in New York — despite the ensuing debate around its authenticity.
“The Leonardo sale helped a great deal, because even people who were not interested said to themselves: ‘Old masters can fetch enormous prices,’” he said. “This is definitely helpful to Botticelli. If you’re a buyer who pays tens of millions for a Jackson Pollock or a Jeff Koons, and you see an icon of Italian art for $30 million, you’re going to buy it.”
While Mr. Orsi said he had received expressions of interest in the Botticelli portrait, there’s no telling whether the Frieze Masters stand will lead to an actual purchase — especially because of an added complication.
While the work has a temporary export license from the Spanish government, it does not have a permanent one, Mr. Orsi said. If someone decides to buy it, Spain has the right of first refusal. The buyer will have to wait months to see whether Spain can raise money to acquire the painting.
What if it does not sell? Mr. Orsi said it would still work out to be a good promotional opportunity for his gallery.
“People will know that I am a gallerist they can trust,” he explained, “someone who can have a Botticelli, a Bernini or a Pontormo.”
Source: Read Full Article