Sheldon Solow bought a rare portrait by Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli for $1.3 million in 1982. The nonagenarian Manhattan real estate tycoon plans to sell it for more than $80 million next year through Sotheby’s.
“Young Man Holding a Roundel” will be sold anonymously in January in a test of the ultra high-end art market after the pandemic restricted sales and largely caused the cancellation of live auctions that are the lifeblood of the industry. Over the years, the portrait was loaned to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 2013 until February.
“It is a masterpiece,” said Robert Simon, an Old Master dealer who was part of the consortium that discovered Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi.” “It’s one of the finest Renaissance portraits to appear on the market in decades.”
Solow is owner of the iconic skyscraper at 9 West 57th in Midtown Manhattan that counts hedge funds, private equity firms and luxury goods giant Chanel as tenants. Born in Brooklyn, he’s now worth $3.7 billion and is renowned as a collector of top-quality modern and postwar art.
Sotheby’s declined to comment on the identity of the seller, noting in its provenance that the painting was purchased at an auction in 1982 for 810,000 pounds — or $1.3 million at the time. Solow didn’t return calls for comment.
Created around 1480, the canvas depicts a handsome young man with a small tondo of a saint in his hands. That work — an original 14th-century piece attributed to the Sienese painter Bartolomeo Bulgarini — was inserted into the Botticelli canvas, according to Christopher Apostle, head of Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department in New York. The identity of the subject is unclear, although it’s been suggested he may have been a member of the Medici family.
Like Da Vinci, Botticelli (1445-1510) has a worldwide appeal.
“The first art book your mom gives you is likely to include Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ and ‘Primavera,’” Apostle said about two famous masterpieces at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. “There’s a built-in love for this artist.”
The highest price for Botticelli at auction, $10.4 million, was achieved in 2013 for “The Rockefeller Madonna: Madonna and Child with Young Saint John the Baptist.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
