Beyond Botticelli: successes and disappointments at Sotheby's old masters sale
Sandro Botticelli - The man of sorrowsPieter van Mol - Diogenes with his lantern looking for an honest man
As expected, Sandro Botticelli's "The man of Sorrows" was the star of Sotheby's Master Paintings & Sculpture auction on January 27, 2022, but other less hyped works achieved results that for better or worse deserve comment.
Images: Sandro Botticelli, "The man of Sorrows," c.1500. Sold for $45.4 million ·· Pieter van Mol, "Diogenes with his lantern looking for an honest man." Sold for $5.8 million.
A year after auctioning a beautiful portrait painted by Sandro Botticelli for more than $92 million, Sotheby's brought to auction "The man of Sorrows," painted during the last period of the artist's career, carrying a pre-sale estimate in excess of $40 million. Although we have already warned that Sotheby's clearly did err on the side of over-enthusiasm in defining the painting as a “masterpiece”, the work is an interesting testimony to the complex relationship between the great Florentine artist and religion. In the end, the painting was auctioned for $45.4 million, amid an almost unanimous sense of disappointment. Personally, I don't see it that way. Except for exceptional cases (such as Leonardo's "Salvator Mundi") this type of paintings, deeply religious, not at all monumental and definitely not "sexy", do not usually achieve great results at auction, and the $45.4 million is a solid result for a painting that, I insist, is far from being a masterpiece.
Looking for disappointments, let's focus on Giovanni Bellini's "Madonna Phillips". Like the Botticelli, it is a religious painting, seemingly unattractive despite the fact that the virgin's face is quite beautiful. But it is a Bellini, one of the great names in Italian painting whose works rarely appear on the market, and the pre-sale estimate of between $3 million and $5 million seemed more than reasonable. Despite this, the painting did not find a buyer. Neither did a small panel of “St. Mary Magdalene Reading” by Correggio, although in this case the pre-sale estimate of $4.5 to $5.5 million did seem too optimistic for this small and not very attractive panel painting.
Let's talk now about the successes: the "oopart" of the auction, a figure of a man from the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, which had a pre-sale estimate of between $3 million and $5 million, sold for almost $10 million, possibly recognizing both its quality and its remarkable state of preservation (considering its almost 4. 500 years old), as well as its provenance, having been legally exported from Egypt in 1921. "Diogenes with his lantern looking for an honest man," an excellent composition by Pieter van Mol, doubled its most optimistic pre-sale estimate, fetching $5.8 million. Due to its style, period and skill in the use of chiaroscuro, a good companion to this painting might be "Young Man Drawing by Candlelight," a small but powerful painting by Gerrit Dou that sold for $746,000, crushing its presale estimate of between $150,000 and $250,000. A "Portrait of the Marquis de Caballero" by Francisco de Goya realized $2.2 million, well above its presale estimate of between $400,000 and $600,000.
In the "Master to Master: The Nelson Shanks Collection" auction, "Venus and Cupid in a Landscape," a beautiful work that Sotheby's attributes to Dosso Dossi, sold for $1.47 million, slightly below its pre-sale estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million.

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