Description

Hello and welcome to my weekly video-podcast on art & architecture in the news.

Today we talk about a Botticelli painting, Young Man Holding a Roundel, which will appear on auction in New York in January 2021. It is considered one of the greatest Renaissance portraits in private hands and it is one of the few surviving artworks by Botticelli (Florence, 1445-1510) and one of his finest portraits. The auction is estimated to fetch more than 80mil dollars or 63mil pounds, one of the highest values at auction for an Old Master.

I would like to provoke a discussion and I have a couple of proposals to the auction house.

The first one is related to the value of the masterpiece. Why just 80mil? Perhaps it is a conservative figure, to me it should be valued more and for a number of reasons:

• This is a timeless masterpiece - It represents all the humanist values embedded in Renaissance, which could be still our values today. Its lack of background and context allows the painting to be a timeless artwork, highlighting the centrality of the humans in creating their own future.
• Moreover, It does not deserve to be valued significantly less than Leonardo - I understand 80mil dollars is a similar value reached at auction by other portraits by Van Gogh and Klimt, but it is still significantly lower than the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo, which reached 450 mil dollars! So perhaps 80 mil is a conservative figure, it should be higher
• The third reason why it should be valued more is a bounty -, 80 mil is unfortunately the same gruesome figure which, back in January this year 2020 was put as a bounty by a country of the Middle East offered for the head of the current President of the United States. Could the Florentine ‘s head have more value than a president’s head?

My first proposal is to the auction house is therefore to raise the valuation.

My second proposal is to include a clause to the auction. The buyer must 

• allow live streaming all year round and
• allow free public viewing for at least 6 months a year in a bespoke and ad hoc structure. 

Would that make sense to you? I hope any decision will allow for the artwork to be visible, as it has been so far in public galleries, loaned by the current seller.

What would you suggest to the auction house? A higher valuation and public viewing are just two of the possible suggestion. Let me know your thoughts!

This is Roby, from ART Tours with a Theme – ART wiT. Thank you for listening and share this blog with your friends!

This video is on FB and IGTV. The podcast (audio recording) is available on 7 platforms under “Art Tours with a Theme”:, including Google Podcast and Spotify.

Enjoy Botticelli, good bye!