Leonardo Da Vinci, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Amadeo Modigliani, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock ... Very few painters are part of the
select club of 100 million dollars
and this January 28
Sandro Botticelli
was about to join as well
.
His painting "Young Man Holding a Medallion," a 15th-century jewel, set a new record for the Renaissance master by selling for more than $ 92 million (76 million euros) on Thursday at an auction organized by Sotheby's.
With a
starting price of $ 70 million
, the exciting auction began after 10:30 in the morning and lasted just over five minutes.
In the end it was reduced to a
"transatlantic bid" between two buyers from New York and London
and was finally sold to an anonymous collector in the British capital at a hammer price of 80 million dollars, which with expenses and commissions reached 92, 18 million dollars, pulverizing the previous record of the Italian painter.
The painting, considered one of the best portraits of the master Botticelli, measures 58 by 39 centimeters and represents a young man with long hair and green eyes dressed in a simple robe and holding a circular medallion with a religious portrait.
His identity is unknown, but Sotheby's specialists believe he could be a friend of the Medici, the powerful Florentine Renaissance family.
"In the popular imagination no other painter evokes the
golden age of the
Florentine
Renaissance
better than Botticelli," said Christopher Apostole, director of Sotheby's antique painting department, before the Grand Masters auction, in which seven other lots exceeded one million dollars, including "The Descent from the Cross", a painting by the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes that exceeded 3.6 million dollars.
To date, the previous record for a work by the Renaissance master dated from January 2013, when the "Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist" was sold to the highest bidder for 10.4 million dollars, during an auction organized by the Christie's home in its legendary New York room.
The canvas auctioned on January 28
multiplies
that price
by nine
.
Only about twenty works of art
are part of the select club of pictorial jewels that reached 100 million dollars at auction.
The latest was "Meules" (1890), by the French impressionist Claude Monet, which sold for $ 110 million during a bid in the Big Apple in May 2019.
To date, the most expensive painting in history remains
"Salvator Mundi"
by Italian master Leonardo da Vinci, after an anonymous buyer disbursed a whopping more than 450 million dollars in 2017. The work was unaccounted for. for more than two years until in 2019 he appeared on a luxurious yacht owned by Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman.
In the club there are also two jewels of the Malaga painter
Pablo Picasso
.
The painting "The Women of Algiers" (1955), which was sold in 2015 for almost 180 million dollars, and "" The dream "(1932), for which a Wall Street fund manager paid 155 million dollars in 2013.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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