“[Botticelli] is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and color, the medium of abstract painting.
In exceptionally good condition, this painting of a Young Man Holding a Roundel embodies Sandro Botticelli’s greatest achievements as a portraitist. Praised by the great Italian Renaissance scholar and museum director John Pope Hennessy as "a giant among portraitists,"1 Botticelli was celebrated in this field, yet precious few examples of his portraits survive today. Were it not for his fashionable tunic, the supremely elegant individual depicted here could have stepped out of one of Botticelli’s mythological or religious paintings, so striking is his resemblance to the beautiful figures that inhabit those works. Innovative in form and at the same time wholly characteristic of Botticelli’s genius, this timeless masterpiece dates to the height of his career. It represents the perfect visual expression of late quattrocento Florentine culture, yet the crisp simplicity of its setting and the lifelike presence of the sitter renders it profoundly modern.
A MASTERPIECE OF RENAISSANCE PORTRAITURE
An attractive young man, seen at half-length and in three-quarter view, sits in front of a stone window frame. Graceful and poised, he is probably aged to his late teenage years. His long, golden hair, parted at center, frames the delicate features of his face, which is animated by his piercing eyes and finely modeled countenance. His brow is strong, his cheekbones high and softly blushed, his nose distinctive, his chin dimpled, his neck long, and his lips thin and rosy, pursed with an air of self-assurance. The subtle hues of his mauve doublet, closed at the neck and fastened with a row of buttons down his chest, perfectly complement the warmth of his skin, while its tonal gradations define his slender and strong figure.
With a confident pose, the sitter presents one of the picture’s most striking features: a roundel of a bearded saint with his right hand raised. This small gold-ground painting, which dates to fourteenth-century Siena, is a separate work of art altogether. It is set into Botticelli’s panel flush with the surface, held in a painted frame and balanced atop a stone parapet. With both hands, the sitter steadies his prized object as he tips it backward ever so slightly, the light from above casting glints of yellow on the fictive frame. The fingers of his left hand and the shadows they cast on the stone below further add to the work’s illusionism, while the intensity of his gaze, calm expression, and lifelike quality pay eloquent testament to Botticelli’s prodigious skills and innovative mind.
This young man emanates a powerful and engaging presence. He is placed forward in the picture plane in direct conversation with his audience. His face offers an endless array of expressions, some more permanent while others more fleeting, ranging from a confident propriety and a sly inner knowing to an approachable warmth and an intellectual grandeur. His lifelike figure fills the composition, balanced and framed on all sides by strong and crisp tones of grey; the curves of his features are impeccably balanced against an unpretentious backdrop of simple geometric forms set into place by a carefully planned network of lines and angles. The seemingly uncomplicated setting coupled with the sitter’s two fingers, which deftly cross over the pictorial boundary, create a wholly convincing three-dimensional space that extends from within the realm of the sitter into that of the viewer.
This portrait descended for generations in the Newborough family in northern Wales, where it hung in the family seat of Glynllifon.2 It was unknown to scholars before it appeared on the art market in the early 20th century, acquired from the Welsh family by Frank Sabin in about 1935. When he sold the painting to the renowned British scientist and collector Sir Thomas Ralph Merton in about 1941, Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery in London, wholly endorsed its attribution to Botticelli and praised it as "one of the finest fifteenth-century portraits I have ever seen on the market."3 First published as Botticelli by Alfred Scharf in his 1950 catalogue of the Merton collection,4 this portrait remained largely out of the public eye for the next few decades, aside from its inclusion in the 1960 Royal Academy Exhibition at Burlington House in London. As such, much of the twentieth-century critical discourse on the artist overlooked this painting, including the monographic studies by Roberto Salvini (1958) and Gabriele Mandel (1970). Roberto Longhi first introduced a possible attribution for this work to Francesco Botticini,5 an attribution later favored by Everett Fahy,6 while Ronald Lightbown included it under his tentative category of "other paintings attributed to Botticelli or his school."7 However, in almost all the years since this painting was acquired by the present owner in 1982, it has been on public view, hanging in prominent international museums (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.) and featuring in important exhibitions as a masterpiece by Botticelli. It is widely considered by scholars today to be one of the artist’s finest and most significant works.
BOTTICELLI’S EARLY CAREER, 1470-1486
Fig. 2. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, Uffizi Gallery, Florence / Bridgeman Images
Sandro Botticelli is the consummate Italian Renaissance artist, the progenitor of some of the most enduring and endearing images of the age, including the Primavera (fig. 1) and The Birth of Venus (fig. 2). The great prestige he achieved during his lifetime subsided after his death in 1510, as his style was considered old-fashioned alongside the grand manner of Raphael and Michelangelo. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century, with its reawakened interest in late quattrocento Florentine history and art, that Botticelli resumed his rightful position as one of the most admired and beloved artists of the Renaissance. As Walter Pater so eloquently said of the artist, “he is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and color, the medium of abstract painting.”8
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, known as Sandro Botticelli, was born around 1444-1445, the son of a tanner.9 He lived and worked in Florence for nearly all his career, and his paintings are synonymous with the city’s artistic achievements. Botticelli’s considerable talents were recognized at a young age. He may have trained as a goldsmith before entering the studio of Fra Filippo Lippi around 1461/1462, where he learned the importance of line, perspective, and overall compositional elegance. Botticelli possibly spent time in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio around 1467, the year Lippi went to Spoleto,10 and by the end of the decade, he had established his own independent workshop in his family home on the Via del Porcellana.
Botticelli burst onto the broader Florentine stage in 1470 with his powerful portrayal of Fortitude (fig. 4), painted for the public assembly hall of the Tribunale della Mercanzia, the commercial court of Florence. In his assured rendering of this virtuous figure, he eclipsed his contemporary Piero del Pollaiuolo, who had already been commissioned to paint other allegories of the virtues for the room.11 In Fortitude, Botticelli established some trademark stylistic elements, from the delicate modelling of the figure’s face, to the extraordinary detail of the costume and architectural setting, to the way the figure fills the pictorial space, set close to the foreground, with the edge of her left toe slightly crossing into the realm of the viewer. Such techniques anticipate their fullest expression over the next two decades and are not so unlike those more maturely employed in the present portrait.
By 1475-1476, Botticelli painted his famed Adoration of the Magi, an altarpiece commissioned by Gaspare del Lama for his family chapel in Santa Maria Novella (fig. 5). Writing more than a century after it was painted, Giorgio Vasari praised this altarpiece as “truly a most admirable work; the composition, the design, and the coloring are so beautiful that every artist who examines it is astonished.”12 The altarpiece underscores Botticelli’s predilection for portraiture. In addition to including his own self-portrait in the right foreground (fig. 3), Botticelli populates this religious scene with several generations of the Medici, preserved for posterity in an engaging range of poses and facial expressions.13 Such important and ambitious commissions as this helped to bring prestige to the artist in this early stage of his career.
In 1480, Botticelli painted his triumphant fresco of Saint Augustine as a pendant to Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Saint Jerome in the church of the Ognissanti (fig. 6). Although his fame had reached far outside Florence by the time of this commission, this painting may have played a part in finally securing the interest of Pope Sixtus IV, who in the fall of 1481 invited Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, and others to fresco the upper walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome with scenes from the lives of Christ and Moses. Botticelli would paint three frescoes in the Chapel that year, and he was recorded back in Florence by the autumn of 1482.14 This Roman sojourn was a highlight of the years that can be regarded as the peak of his career, from the late 1470s to the mid-1480s, and many of his best works—including the Primavera (circa 1480) and The Birth of Venus (circa 1485)—can all be dated within a few years of this pivotal moment.
This Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel also belongs to this period of fevered artistic creativity. Richard Stapleford, in the first comprehensive overview of the portrait, dates it to Botticelli’s time in Rome or in the two or three years following, that is, the first half of the 1480s, a dating also proposed by the curators of the 2009-2010 exhibition Botticelli: Likeness, Myth, Devotion at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Others have suggested a dating to the late 1470s,15 which would add significantly to the portrait’s rarity, bringing it closer in terms of its chronology to Botticelli’s famed Portrait of a Young Man with the Medal of Cosimo il Vecchio in the Uffizi (fig. 11), datable to about 1475, and the sequence of portraits of Giuliano de’ Medici (fig. 12), painted posthumously after his assassination on Easter Sunday of 1478. Whatever the precise dating, the present portrait shares many characteristics that define Botticelli’s works at the height of his powers: confident rendering, elegant refinement, and visual innovation.
BOTTICELLI AND THE MEDICI
Botticelli’s name is synonymous with the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492), known already in his own lifetime as Lorenzo the Magnificent (fig. 7). Born into the most powerful banking family of the Florentine Republic, the son of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici and Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo became de facto head of state in 1469 and led the Republic until his death in 1492. He was a wise and talented leader, whose political strengths, which emulated those of his grandfather Cosimo il Vecchio, were equally rivaled by his passion for the arts. Lorenzo, who was an avid collector himself, fostered some of the greatest artistic and intellectual minds of his age, serving as an enthusiastic patron to painters, sculptors, poets, and philosophers. In addition to Botticelli, he welcomed to his court the artists Andrea del Verrocchio, the Pollaiuolo brothers, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci as well as the humanist scholars Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The flourishing cultural center that he created opened endless cultural possibilities and opportunities, and Vasari would later aptly describe his reign as “truly a golden age for men of talent.”16
Botticelli was one of the most successful and sought-after artists in Florence during this golden age. In the 1470s and 1480s, he secured regular commissions and support from the Medici family, as well as from their elite entourage and religious establishments. He would quickly become the choice artist of this group of patrons, under whose auspices he enjoyed great favor and painted some of his most complex masterpieces. In this fertile environment, Botticelli was close to some of the greatest minds of the era, many of whom would inspire much of his pictorial language. Within these intellectual circles at the Medici court, Renaissance Humanism found firm grounding. It led to a revived interest in classical antiquity and ancient texts, inspired the collecting of ancient objects, focused attention on the individual, and placed an increased emphasis on artistic invention. The present portrait is very much a product of that erudite and highly educated world.
As is the case with many portraits of this period, the identity of the handsome young sitter in this painting has been lost to history. He is likely a member of the Medici family or someone from their close circle, and his resemblance to the men of this family is emphasized by Karla Langedijk in her survey of Medici portraiture.17 In his 1950 catalogue, Scharf dismissed the idea that the young man might be Piero de’ Medici (1472–1503), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, instead identifying the sitter as Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (1467–1498), also known as Giovanni “il Popolano,” Lorenzo’s cousin from a secondary branch of the family who was later to marry Caterina Sforza in 1497—a union which would produce the line that would later become the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. This identification is particularly attractive, as his own older brother, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (also “il Popolano”), was likely the first owner of the Primavera and the Birth of Venus, however this idea has not found universal support.18 Some resemblance can also be drawn to the likeness of the young Lorenzo di Giovanni Tornabuoni (1468-1497), the fair-haired younger cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo Tornabuoni was known for his noble beauty and brilliant mind, and he held a favored position of the Medici court. His profile features appear in Botticelli’s fresco of A Young Man Being Introduced to the Seven Liberal Arts, today in the Musée du Louvre.19 Attempts have also been made to link the name of the young man to the saint in the roundel he holds, but the saint’s lack of attributes precludes a firm identification on an iconographic basis.
BOTTICELLI AS A PORTRAITIST
To the contemporary mind Botticelli’s mythological and religious masterpieces represent the near summation of Florentine Renaissance art and culture. He should be equally celebrated, however, for his portraits. Although fewer in number, they provide a more direct window into late quattrocento society than do his saints or mythological figures. Only about a dozen portraits by him survive, almost all in museum collections, but they represent an important part of Botticelli’s corpus and provide a deeper understanding of his genius. Botticelli remained at the forefront of innovation in this genre, exploring spatial relationships and effects of light in his composition. He was instrumental in advancing portraiture to its more fully modern form, propelling it from the decorative or summary likenesses of the mid-fifteenth century towards the advances that are on full display in the present picture. Only he and a few other painters of his day, such as the Pollaiuolo brothers, began to convey a sense of personality and inner character that had not been attempted in Italy since antiquity.
Florence had already witnessed a revived interest in the genre of portraiture by the mid-fifteenth century. Many of the portraits of this earlier period often depicted their subjects in profile or as donors in religious works, ancillary to the spiritual narrative of the whole composition (although subtly reminding the viewer who had bankrolled the painter’s efforts). By the time Botticelli became an independent master, however, emphasis had begun to shift towards the single figure alone, rendered with a more lifelike presence. Undoubtedly, Botticelli’s exploration of portraiture was in part a response to the dazzling humanist atmosphere fostered in Florence by the Medici, but it also had distinct roots in a tradition already established in Northern Europe. Netherlandish artists were among the first painters in the fifteenth century to capture realistic, bust-length likenesses of individuals turned in a three-quarter view. Their mastery of the oil technique allowed them to produce minutely rendered illusionistic details which astounded their contemporaries. Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of the Goldsmith Jan de Leeuw20 from earlier in the 15th century is a striking example of this, so is Hans Memling’s more contemporary Portrait of a Young Man in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (fig. 8),21 which was likely sent to Florence soon after it was completed in circa 1472-1475. The latter of these and other works by Northern artists were to have a lasting impact on Florentine art by the time Botticelli was painting his first portraits in the 1470s.
Botticelli’s earliest efforts in portraiture were produced at about the same time he began to receive important public commissions, no doubt a sign of the young artist’s growing prestige. Perhaps the first of these is the depiction of another fashionable Florentine youth, the Portrait of a Young Man with a Mazzocchio, circa 1470, in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (fig. 9).22 In that painting, the sitter is shown in the simplest manner possible: head and shoulders against a neutral light blue background. Even at this early date, there is already a patently successful attempt to render the sitter’s personality. The youth’s slightly pursed lips and his somewhat haughty glare suggest, if nothing else, that he is extremely pleased with his very fashionable attire. Botticelli’s attempts at psychological analysis never slackened after this, and his subsequent portraits only magnified in skill and scope.
Right: Fig. 10. Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Lady known as Smeralda Bandinelli, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. One of Botticelli's only female portraits not painted in profile.
Botticelli furthered these developments by using architectural elements to define interior spaces. In the 1470s, he started to experiment with these settings by using fictive constructions to create a deeper illusion of three-dimensionality, thus drawing the viewer’s eye into the space that his sitters occupied. This is visible in his Portrait of a Young Woman said to be Smeralda Bandinelli, circa 1470, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (fig. 10),23 one of the only female portraits in which the artist has turned the sitter in a three-quarter rather than a profile view. This approach was perhaps more successfully realized in his Portrait of a Man of circa 1475, formerly in the Museo Filangieri, Naples (and destroyed during the Second World War).24
As Botticelli moved through that decade into the early 1480s, he abandoned more complicated interiors, favoring a simplified background as an ideal setting to focus the viewer’s attention on his sitters. Indeed, this move to abstraction reaches a culmination in the present Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel, where the artist uses bands of carefully chosen contrasting shades of grey to create a stone “box” in which to pose his sitter. The tonalities of the blue and the stripes of grey are positioned to heighten the sense of depth in the composition and to lure the eye both forwards and backwards. The subtle shadow cast on the ledge by the hand of the young man as he holds the framed medallion only reinforces the illusion that Botticelli has created with the sparest amount of visual information possible.
Right: Fig. 12. Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
The present work is thus, arguably, one of the master’s best portraits and is reflective of the revolution that Botticelli was helping to create. It is comparable in its inventiveness and superb quality to his Portrait of a Young Man with the Medal of Cosimo il Vecchio, at the Uffizi in Florence (fig. 11) and his Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (fig. 12).25 The former, which dates to about 1475 and is the only known portrait by Botticelli in which he sets his sitter in front of a landscape, a nod to the northern tradition, includes a roundel in pastiglia meant to represent a medal of Cosimo il Vecchio. Although the technique is different, the comparison between the Uffizi portrait and this Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel is unavoidable and suggests a more than coincidental connection between the sitter and the objects that they hold out for us to examine. While the earlier example in the Uffizi presents a clear message—that the young man is very much pro-Medici—the handsome young man in the present portrait remains a tantalizing enigma. The latter portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici is part of a series of posthumous portraits commissioned from Botticelli after Giuliano’s assassination on Easter of 1478. Like the present example, Giuliano is placed against a simplified background of pietra serena, the cool grey stone that defined much of Florentine architecture of the period. With downcast eyes, he is turned partly in profile, an element which allows for his distinct, and almost saintly features, to be captured. Resting on the parapet in the lower left are a twig and a turtledove, possibly symbols to remind the viewers of his untimely death.
THE ROUNDEL
One of this picture’s most fascinating elements is the round, gold ground panel proudly held in the hands of the dashing young man—an older work of art set into the new. It is by Bartolomeo Bulgarini, a fourteenth century Sienese artist whose refined technique reveals the influence of Duccio, Ugolino di Nerio and Pietro Lorenzetti.26 The grain of the wood and the truncated punchwork of the background confirm it as a fragment—one not always round in shape, but rather cut out of a larger, vertical panel. While some of the gilding around the curved edges has been repaired, the figure of the saint has survived, like the rest of this painting, in very good condition. He is depicted half-length with a long grey beard, balding head and wearing a grey mantle atop an orange robe. Set against a gilded background, he is surrounded by a network of geometric punchwork that serves to frame his figure in a manner not unlike the painted architectural setting behind the young man. The saint lacks any identifiable iconographic attributes, and only his right hand is visible, raised in an apparent gesture of blessing.
Bulgarini was active from about 1337-1378, primarily in Siena but also in other cities throughout Tuscany. This included Florence, where his works were still present in Botticelli’s lifetime, including a polyptych painted in the 1340s for the Covoni family in Florence, possibly for their family chapel in the basilica of Santa Croce. This polyptych, which included a number of Franciscan saints in each register, was recorded by Vasari in his lifetime as still in Santa Croce in the chapel of Saint Sylvester.27 Many art historians have considered an altarpiece by Bulgarini that was in the Museo di Santa Croce until 1966 (and now in storage) to be identifiable as the Covoni polyptych, although more recent information has brought this into question. In his 1987 article, Stapleford discussed stylistic similarities between a bust of an angel from that altarpiece and the saint in the roundel discussed here;28 Judith Steinhoff-Morrison explored this idea further in her doctoral dissertation on Bulgarini, tentatively suggesting that this roundel may have originally formed part of the same altarpiece.29 She also introduced the intriguing possibility that the saint’s gesture could relate to a tradition of sign language used by Franciscan monks to signal a vow of silence.30 Whatever the exact origin of the roundel, a number of gothic period altarpieces were being disassembled in Florence during the second half of the 15th century, as chapels and churches were being updated in the new Renaissance style, and thus would have provided ample sources of such earlier paintings for collectors and artists alike.
While admiration for this portrait’s astounding quality and beauty is unequivocal, it is this trecento roundel that continues to attract lively scholarly debate. Was something other than what we see today once held in the young man's hands? Some art historians believe so. One of the first was Roberto Longhi who considered the insertion of a fragment of a Gothic polyptych into a Renaissance frame as “antistorico,” or ahistorical.31 He instead believed that the roundel was a later substitute for a pastiglia medallion that disintegrated over time, similar to the gilt gesso disc in Botticelli’s portrait in the Uffizi. Longhi’s idea of there being a lack of historical precedent for repurposing works of art in such a manner has been upheld by other scholars, such as Keith Christiansen, who rule out the fifteenth century marriage of the roundel and Botticelli’s panel and consider it rather a later nineteenth or twentieth century alteration.32 Further attention on this side of the argument is placed on the contradictory relationship between the angle of the illusionistic frame and the flat, frontal format of the roundel.33 David Alan Brown, in the catalogue for the 2001-2002 exhibition Virtue and Beauty at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., introduced the possibility that this roundel replaced a mirror, in which would have appeared the reflection of the young man’s beloved.34
However, other scholars—including Alexander Nagel, Richard Stapleford, Hubert von Sonnenberg, and Petra Kathke—believe that the Sienese roundel is original to Botticelli’s conception, set into the panel by the artist himself. To these minds, it is integral to the meaning of the painting, as are the “medal” of Cosimo il Vecchio to the Uffizi portrait, and the turtledove and dead twig to Giuliano’s portrait in Washington. Scharf and Chastel suggested the roundel may be evidence of a special devotion of the sitter to the object or the saint,35 while Stapleford introduced the idea of it being a vanitas object, one that highlighted the passage of time and the transience of the material world. Stapleford notes, “the power of Botticelli’s portrait lies in his ability to express the exquisite beauty inherent in life while simultaneously confronting the fragility of that beauty.”36 Nagel, whose essay Conversation Across Time: Botticelli’s Young Man Holding a Roundel accompanies this text, considers the roundel’s inclusion as consistent with the cultural and intellectual milieu of the period as well as its artistic and collecting practice. By the late fourteenth century, the trade of icons and trecento panels was thriving, as revered archaic objects and fragments from dismantled medieval altars flooded into the hands of avid collectors and artists.37 Other support for the roundel being intended by Botticelli lies in the visual similarities between the young man and the saint, which do not appear to be merely coincidental: both are depicted in half length, both are attired in simple clothing, both are framed by a geometric element, and both add dimension to their compositions by the position of their fingers.38 In addition, the strong illusion created by Botticelli in this portrait would argue against an element such as a pastiglia medallion, a three dimensional addition that would counteract the effect crafted by the artist’s faultlessly calibrated execution of the fictive frame into which it would have been set and by the sitter’s perfectly articulated hands.
The Power of Botticelli's portrait lies in his ability to express the exquisite beauty inherent in life while simultaneously confronting the fragility of that beauty.
All said, the originality of the roundel and its significance have yet to be fully resolved, for in no other portrait by Botticelli or his contemporaries is such a conceit used, the closest analogy being the Uffizi portrait (fig. 11). What is certain, however, is that the roundel is of an older age and that an intricate network of carefully incised lines made by Botticelli in the preparatory stages of this portrait affirms his innovative conception of a round object to be set in this position within a painted frame.
TECHNICAL FINDINGS
This painting has survived in remarkable condition. Its excellent state of preservation underscores Botticelli’s confident and consummate skills, yet further insights into his mind and his creative process are revealed through modern imaging technology, which unveils information beyond the painted surface. X-radiographs, for example, point to fascinating changes in the evolution of the portrait (fig. 13); the sitter’s hair was lengthened to his shoulders and changes were made to the collar of his tunic. Infrared reflectography reveals a freely executed underdrawing in parts of the picture, some of which show how Botticelli made various adjustments to the composition (fig. 14). For instance, Botticelli used gestural lines to sketch the shape of the sitter’s slender torso. He made changes to the position of the sitter’s hands, the placement of his left shoulder, the profile of his neck and chin, and the position of the row of buttons on his tunic. The hands show denser and more vigorous brush marking than the face, and they are painted over completed costume and architectural elements. The technical findings for this portrait are more fully explored by Karen E. Thomas and Matt Hayes in an analysis that accompanies this text, titled The Materials and Making of Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel.
Comparable working techniques are found in other portraits by Botticelli. Infrared imaging recently undertaken of the Uffizi’s Portrait of a Young Man with the Medal of Cosimo il Vecchio (fig. 11) shows a similarly applied underdrawing to define the edge of the face, lips, and eyes. It also reveals that many changes were made to the placement of that sitter’s fingers after the stucco relief was set into the panel, for the medal was larger than planned, so the fingers had to be reimagined.39 Similar to the present portrait, Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady known as Smeralda Bandinelli (fig. 10) shows compositional changes to the sitter’s arms, hands and sleeves, made as the painted composition was evolving—an illustration of how this technique was typical of Botticelli’s working practice and design process already in the early 1470s. In that painting, Botticelli similarly used incised lines to lay out the composition after his underdrawing for the sitter was largely complete.40
PROVENANCE
The importance of the present portrait is even further enhanced by its distinguished provenance. While old inventory numbers on the reverse would seem to indicate earlier, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century owners (fig. 15), the portrait is first securely recorded in the collection of the Newborough Family of Glynllifon Park, Caernarfon, (fig. 16) Wales, probably by the late eighteenth century. According to Newborough family history, and further discussed by Brian Moloney in a series of essays,41 Sir Thomas Wynn (1736-1807), 1st Lord Newborough, is thought to have been its first recorded owner. Sir Thomas Wynn, who served as a member of Parliament from 1761-1807 and was raised to the peerage in 1776, likely acquired the painting in Florence, where he lived from 1782-1791 in “a very obscure manner”, according to Horace Mann. It is thought that he possibly received it as a gift from Leopold II (1747-1792), Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1765-1790.42 While in Florence, Wynn married his second wife, a young woman by the name of Maria Stella Petronilla Chiappini (1773-1843), an equally eccentric character who later in life claimed she was the legitimate heir of Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, having been secretly traded at birth for a male child.43 Lord Newborough returned to Wales in 1791 with a reluctant Maria Stella, probably with the painting in tow.
Letters in the Newborough archives reveal that Spencer Bulkeley Wynn (1803-1888), 3rd Lord Newborough and the younger son of the 1st Lord Newborough and Maria Stella, was also actively acquiring paintings for the Newborough Collection from the 1840s until the 1870s,44 leaving open the possibility that if not the 1st Lord Newborough, it certainly could have been the 3rd who acquired the present painting. The 3rd Lord Newborough died a wealthy man in 1888. While the Barony passed to his grandson, William Charles Wynn (1873-1916), 4th Lord Newborough, his estate at Glynllifon passed to his youngest son Frederick George Wynn (1853-1932). After Frederick’s death, the Glynllifon reverted back to his nephew Thomas John Wynn (1878-1957), 5th Lord Newborough, 45 and many of the family’s possessions came on the market, including furniture, decorative arts, paintings, and the present portrait, which was sold by Lord Newborough, possibly through an intermediary agent, to the London dealer Frank Sabin in circa 1935.46
“Thomas Ralph Merton, scientist, inventor and connoisseur of the fine arts…”
This portrait in turn was sold by Sabin in 1941 to the distinguished British physicist, spectrometrist, and inventor Sir Thomas Ralph Merton (1888-1969), whose achievements in the realm of the sciences were matched by the caliber of his art collection.47 He was a true connoisseur, finding a passion for art after visiting museums around Europe with his son John, who would go on to be an accomplished artist himself. Sir Thomas’s carefully curated collection, amassed in the 1930s and 1940s, consisted of over thirty masterworks of the highest quality, primarily examples from the Italian and Northern Renaissance that dated from 1450 to 1520. His collection was formed with an astute eye—one directed not towards size or subject, even though many of the paintings were portraits, but rather towards brushwork, color and the quality of pigments—elements inspired by his scientific background and his interest in spectrometry. This Botticelli portrait was undoubtedly the highlight of his collection, serving as the frontispiece of his 1950 collection catalogue written by Scharf as well as the poster image for the 1960 Royal Academy Exhibition of Italian Art in Britain. Other notable paintings from his collection included Bartolomeo Montagna’s Virgin and Child with a Saint of circa 1483 today in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool,48 Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of a Woman Holding Grapes in a private collection (fig. 17),49 Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate in an Alcove (fig. 18),50 Piero del Pollaiuolo’s Portrait of a Youth,51 Hans Holbein the Younger’s Portrait of Johannes Froben,52 among many others. Merton’s passion for the arts also extended into the positions he held on several museum boards, including the National Gallery as well as its Scientific Advisory Board, and the board of the National Portrait Gallery. After his death in 1969, his collection passed to his wife, Violet Marjory Merton, and after she died in 1976, many of the paintings from the collection came on the market. The present portrait was acquired by the present owner in 1982 at Christie’s in London, where it was sold by the order of the Merton Trustees.
Right: Fig. 18. Sandro Botticelli, Madonna and Child with pomegranate / © Christie's Images, Bridgeman Images
Discover More About Sandro Botticelli's Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel
ENDNOTES:
1. J. Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, London and New York 1966, p. 23.
2. Despite extensive research in archives in Wales, 19th century references to the painting have yet to be uncovered. Accounts from descendants of the Newborough family record the painting as hanging in a hall at Glynllifon, while other accounts record it as hanging above a doorway in the butler’s pantry, out of view from many visitors. For further information, see Stapleford 1987, p. 428.
3. Stapleford 1987, p. 432, note 14, as recorded in a letter dated 28 March 1941 from Clark to Frank Sabin.
4. Scharf 1950.
5. Longhi 1960.
6. Fahy 1967.
7. Lightbown 1978.
8. W. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1893, revised edition, D. Hill, (ed.), Berkeley 1980, p. 40.
9. Sandro’s nickname botticelli, or little wine cask, was likely one he inherited from his older and barrel-chested brother, who held a similar nickname of botticello.
10. For further discussion on the possibility of Botticelli working with Verrocchio, see A. Schumacher, “The Painter Sandro Botticelli: An Introduction to his Oeuvre,” in Botticelli: Likeness. Myth. Devotion, Frankfurt 2009, pp. 21, 43.
11. For Pollaiuolo’s depiction of Charity, for example, see Schumacher 2009, p. 21, reproduced fig. 7.
12. G. Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, J. Foster (ed.), vol. II, London 1892, p. 230.
13. Discussions remain as to the identity of all the figures in this painting. Recent suggested identifications of the three kneeling Magi have included Cosimo de’Medici, Giovanni de’ Medici, and Piero de’ Medici, while the two other men with dark hair standing in front of the crowds and closest to the Virgin and Child are perhaps Lorenzo de’ Medici at left, with his unique hat and lightly colored mantel, and Giuliano de’ Medici at right with a downturned head. See A. Schumacher 2009, p. 16.
14. The subjects Botticelli would paint on the walls of the Sistine Chapel are: The Temptations of Christ, The Youth of Moses, The Punishment of Korah.
15. See Boskovits 2004. Dombrowski (2009) is largely alone in dating the painting to circa 1490.
16. G. Vasari (J. Foster, ed.), London 1892, p. 230.
17. Langedijk 1983, vol. 1, p. 36.
18. Luciano Berti has recently suggested an identification of the sitter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, noting a resemblance also to the figure of Mercury in the Primavera. Berti 2015.
19. This identification, however, would suggest a dating of the portrait closer to the mid-1480s, in terms of the age of the sitter. Lorenzo was the nephew of Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Trained as a banker, he was highly educated (fluent in Latin and Greek), and he was tutored in the Studio Fiorentino under many of the great Renaissance minds, including Poliziano. The fresco that includes his likeness (A Young Man Being Introduced to the Seven Liberal Arts, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. RF 322) was originally painted for the young Lorenzo’s private chambers in the Villa Tornabuoni in Careggi (today the Villa Lemmi), and was painted around 1486, the year he married Giovanni di Maso degli Albizzi (1468-1488).
20. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. 946, oil on panel, 33 by 27.5 cm.
21. Inv. no. 1975.1.112, oil on oak panel, 40 by 29 cm.
22. Inv. no. 372, tempera on panel, 51 by 33.7 cm.
23. Inv. no. CAI. 100, tempera on panel, 65.7 by 41 cm.
24. Tempera on panel, 51 by 37 cm. See Fondazione Zeri Archive, ref. no. 12593.
25. Inv. no. 1952.5.56, tempera on panel, 75.5 by 52.5 cm.
26. Before documentary evidence was uncovered that revealed Bulgarini’s true identity, his works were grouped under the working names of two anonymous masters, including “Ugolino Lorenzetti,” by Bernard Berenson and the “Master of the Ovile Madonna” by E.T. Dewald (1923). Offner was the first to identify this roundel as belonging to the Ovile Master.
27. The armorials of the Covoni family are found in the upper corners of the predella. For a full discussion of the altarpiece, see Steinhoff-Morrison 1989, pp. 341-353, cat. no. 5. For an image, see Fondazione Zeri Archive, ref. no. 5946.
28. Stapleford 1987, p. 432, fig. 4.
29. Steinhoff-Morrison 1989, p. 356.
30. Steinhoff-Morrison 1989, p. 356.
31. Longhi 1960, p. 61. Zöllner 2003 also agrees the roundel is a later addition.
32. Boskovits considers the roundel a 19th century insertion. Boskovits 2004.
33. Christiansen 1987, p. 744.
34. Brown 2001, p. 178.
35. Scharf 1950 and Chastel 1965.
36. Stapleford 1987, p. 436.
37. Dr. Emily L. Spratt has recently introduced the connection of this roundel to late Byzantine and Post-Byzantine icons. Such icons circulated around the Italian Peninsula at this time, and many of these found their ways into the Medici Collections in the 15th century. In the context of Florentine interest in devotional images—either Byzantine or Byzantinising in their appearance—the roundel may well hint at the continued complexities of East-West cultural exchanges in the period. Dr. Spratt plans to publish her findings.
38. Kathke 1997.
39. D. Kunzelman, “Comparative technical investigation of paintings by Sandro Botticelli,” in Sandro Botticelli: Artist and Entrepreneur in Renaissance Florence, Florence 2015, pp. 36-37.
40. See N. Costaras and C. Richardson, “Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady known as Smeralda Bandinelli: a technical study,” in Botticelli Past and Present, A. Debenedetti and C. Elam (ed.), pp. 36-52, particularly p. 40, in which the incision of the architectural features following the conception for the placement of the figure.
41. Moloney 1969, p. 35.
42. Moloney 1969, p. 35.
43. Moloney 1969, p. 35. See also Sir. R. Payne Gallway, The Mystery of Maria Stella, Lady Newborough, 1907.
44. For example, see a letter of 19 March 1841 from Philip Morris of Clayton Square, Liverpool to Lord Newborough. In this letter, Mr. Morris, after hearing that Lord Newborough is acquiring paintings, writes to the Lord telling him that he has about twelve paintings to spare, from Jan Steen to Hogarth, among others. Newborough Family Archives, Rhagorol Online Catalogue, Gwynedd Council, no. XD2/19525, a
45. See Davis 1983, p. 138.
46. After the death of F.G. Wynn, there was a house sale at Glynllifon Park on 23-27th of August, organized by John Pritchard & Co, as advertised in Country Life Magazine, vol. 72, Issue 1857, 20 August 1932. Much of the remainder of Newborough’s collection was sold in the mid-late 1930s with the help of Christie’s. Property from the Rt. Hon. Lord Newborough was offered at Christie’s London on 24 August 1932, 11 June 1937, and 18 March 1938.
47. Merton’s inventions, which were largely intertwined with WWI included the two-layer radar screen, the black paint used for aircraft bombers to make them less visible at night, and the nitrous oxide to increase the speed of fighter aircrafts, among others. For all of his inventions, including those in peacetime, see Harley and Gabor 1970.
48. Inv. no. WAG 9375, oil on panel, 27.8 by 36.6 cm.
49. Oil on panel transferred to canvas, 81.6 by 55 cm., signed middle right with the artist’s device and dated 1528. Sale: New York, Sotheby’s, 24-25 January 2008, lot 30, where sold for $5,081,000 to a private collector.
50. Oil and tempera on panel, 100 by 65.1 cm. Sale: London, Christie’s, 7 December 2006, lot 39, for $7,497,053.
51. Scharf 1950, cat. no. XIV, reproduced.
52. Scharf 1950, cat. no. XXV, reproduced.