Joven sosteniendo un tondo

Botticelli painted very few portraits. Only about a dozen survive, which made this young man, painted around 1480 with a small devotional roundel cradled in his hands, one of the last of his kind still in private ownership. In January 2021 that rarity caught up with him. He sold at auction in New York for 92 million dollars, a record for the artist and one of the highest prices ever paid for an old master. For decades before that the panel hung on loan at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, so New Yorkers had grown used to his cool, level gaze without ever being able to buy him. The roundel he holds is itself a small painting, an older image of a saint set into a work made in the 15th century.