The $80m Botticelli: could its auction trigger a Covid-rescue fire sale?

There’s money in those Renaissance hills. The Royal Academy can sniff it. Confronted with a huge pandemic deficit that may mean sacking 150 workers, some Academicians have reportedly headed up to the cobwebby attic – or rather Norman Foster’s Sackler Galleries – to put a price on their most precious heirloom. “A hundred million pounds,” they whisper. So should the RA sell The Virgin and Child With the Infant St John – Michelangelo’s poetically unfinished marble relief and the only stone sculpture of his that Britain has – to save jobs and secure the Academy’s future?

Actually, £100m may be way too low a figure – because, as the RA has doubtless noticed, Sotheby’s has just estimated a portrait by Michelangelo’s fellow Florentine Sandro Botticelli will shortly fetch at least $80m (£63m) at auction in New York. There is clearly a huge leap in preciousness between Young Man Holding a Roundel, as Botticelli’s lovely painting is called, to a sculpture that’s not only by Michelangelo’s hand but even has his chisel marks all over it. Yes, Michelangelo’s chisel, held and hammered by him, a year or so after he finished David. Gotta be worth something.

Why is the Italian Renaissance so expensive all of a sudden? The immediate answer is the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for $450m in 2017, the highest price ever paid at auction for any artwork. You can see the none too subtle logic of trying to follow that with works by his peers, Botticelli and Michelangelo.

The market magic lies in the almost impossible, counter-factual quality of masterpieces by these giants of the Renaissance coming on sale after so many centuries and so much reverence, when even their tiniest sketches are under lock and key in museums. It’s like Shakespeare writing a new play – tickets would sell fast. Critics of the heavily restored Salvator Mundi claim this “new” Leonardo is too good to be true. But Botticelli’s intensely gazing, wavy-haired youth is the genuine article. The painting’s provenance is as solid as can be, including many years in an aristocratic collection in Wales. It’s a well-preserved painting with that strange cocktail of precision and ethereality that makes Botticelli so captivating.

You need to price in a lot of history when you try to put a value on masterpieces from Renaissance Italy. This may be a portrait of a key member of the Medici family, the wealthiest bankers in medieval Europe and semi-official rulers of 15th and 16th century Florence. It’s typical of the enigmatic paintings Botticelli made for the Medici and their close circle in the 1470s-80s when he was at the heart of one of the most cultured, intellectual yet glamorous courts of all time – that of Lorenzo de’ Medici, “The Magnificent”.

The precious looks of this young man – he is as beautiful as the women and goddesses Botticelli depicted, with equally good hair – are surely those of a refined courtier. Another portrait by Botticelli in London’s National Gallery shows a more workaday youth – someone of Botticelli’s own class, an artisan. Botticelli had lofty aspirations: although artists were still thought of as craftsmen, in his painting The Adoration of the Magi, he portrays himself in a long orange robe gazing philosophically out of a company of Magi who also include Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici and the leading intellectuals they patronised. So there he is, among this philosophical elite, who share the rediscovered wisdom of such ancient authors as Plato and Lucretius, recently rediscovered in Florence.

Young Man Holding a Roundel shares that same sense of secret knowledge. Botticelli depicts the youth with a medieval religious work, an actual 14th-century painting that portrays a saint. For all his elegance, this young man is lost in grave thought, pondering mysteries beyond the surface of life. He seems to be escaping the grey stone frame that holds him, as if fleeing the corporal world. Botticelli’s art is about transcendence. Like his sad-eyed Venuses who float just beyond reality, this young man has his mind on the infinite. He’s searching for something more than this shallow modern merchant world.

To return to the shallows, can anyone put a price on such mystery? Of course not, but you can’t blame the market for trying. In an age that doesn’t have time to read Florentine humanist commentaries on Plato, we can only express our wonder at the Renaissance greats through a price tag.

They’d have understood that. Botticelli got paid for his visions from the big pockets – and through the very modern credit arrangements – of Florentine bankers and merchants. Michelangelo too was encouraged by Lorenzo the Magnificent. Later he became so rich, he was suspected of sharp dealing. Would he be shocked at the RA putting a price on a cultural treasure? I doubt it. He knew his worth precisely.