S andro Botticelli's The Man of Sorrows is a stark and haunting picture. Dating from around 1500, at first glance it looks like a bust-length portrait painted from life. But since the subject is someone not seen in the flesh for a thousand years and more, it cannot be that and must be taken for a vision. I suspect that this uneasy blend of the imaginary and the real is part of Botticelli’s meaning: his way of declaring that salvation lies in the same act of empathy that has made a picture such as this possible. If you can make Christ so present, in your heart and soul, that he might be standing in front of you, then – and only then – might you be saved.

Christ is clothed in red, the colour of blood and the colour of his Passion. He is so tightly bound he can barely move. Ropes cut into his wrists and arms. He wears a crown of thorns as fat as a snake. Blood trickles down his forehead and into the cavity of his right eye. His head is haloed by a troupe of tiny dancing angels, who are armed with the instruments of his Passion: the scourge, the lance, the column to which he was bound, the vinegary sponge with which he was mocked, the cross itself.

The signs of his suffering are everywhere about him, most subtly in his eyes, where compassion is mingled with smouldering anger. He is Christ the Judge as well as Christ the Saviour. It is easy to imagine him casting off the ropes that bind him, raising his right hand to bless the saved, lowering his left to condemn the damned. This is not a picture that invites you to stand in front of it in admiration. It is a picture that bids you to kneel, to think, to make a choice. Choose badly and you will end up on Christ’s left side: the sinister side, which leads to hell.

Past Auction

Master Paintings & Sculpture Part I

27 January 2022 | 10:00 AM EST | New York

The Man of Sorrows is a remarkable rediscovery – prior to the current auction it had been in a private collection since 1963, and practically unseen until its inclusion in an exhibition at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum in 2009. It is also a precious addition to the known corpus of Botticelli’s late work, not least because it reminds us that artists do not stand still. Like us all, they live complicated lives, in real time, and change their attitudes to all kinds of things (including the purpose of art itself) during the process. It is interesting to compare the work with his considerably earlier Young Man Holding a Roundel, circa 1480, which was auctioned by Sotheby’s in January 2021. They could hardly be more different: one an elegant secular portrait and the other a deeply pious depiction of Christ. Yet it is an essential part of Botticelli’s story that he was able to move between such polar opposites. In doing so, he expressed the doubts and fears of an anxious age.

Botticelli has been remembered above all as the great sensualist of Florentine Renaissance painting. This is largely due to The Birth of Venus which is, I suspect, the second most famous Old Master painting in the world (after Mona Lisa). Of course, it deserves to be famous, not only for its limpid brilliance and erotic power, but also – something less widely appreciated, because easily forgotten – for its profound originality. Not only was it one of the very first large-scale mythological paintings in the entire history of Western art, it also inaugurated that tradition of painting the female nude that would produce so many other masterpieces over the centuries. Yet the truth is that Botticelli painted relatively few mythologies. The majority of his pictures were religious works of art. Such evidence that we have suggests that in later life Botticelli deeply regretted his excursions into myth and eros.

In the 1490s, when he was in his early 50s, the painter was one of many Florentine citizens to fall under the spell of the charismatic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola preached that the Christian world had fallen into decadence and could only save itself by repentance and a return to the values of Christ himself: humility, charity and the renunciation of worldly things. As might be imagined, this set Savonarola at odds with the Medici dynasty, whom he managed to oust from power in 1494. The city briefly became a popular republic, regularly convulsed by so-called “bonfires of the vanities”, where citizens were encouraged to burn their most treasured possessions – including any works of art deemed to be irreligious.

Botticelli was so moved by Savonarola’s sermons that he was said to have publicly burned some of his own mythological pictures. Giorgio Vasari, in his The Lives of Artists, wrote that Botticelli was an “ardent partisan” of the hellfire Dominican. Not many paintings survive from his later years, but those that do clearly reflect the highly introspective, mystical sense of devotion that lay at the root of Savonarola’s teachings. The National Gallery's Mystic Nativity, with its hallucinatory distortions of scale and cast of ecstatic dancing angels, is one of the most striking examples of the older Botticelli’s severely ascetic brand of piety. The Man of Sorrows, which has its own troupe of balletic, stylised angels, and shares the same quality of spectral immediacy, is surely close in date to the National Gallery’s painting. It is less elaborate and more confrontational, but every bit as fervent in its insistence on the fundamentals of Christian faith.

But to understand that Savonarola influenced The Man of Sorrows is, I think, only to begin to appreciate what the painting is, and from where it really comes. This is because Savonarola’s teachings were themselves only one expression of a much broader, long-established movement within Christianity. The principal impulse behind it was a desire to strip away the many accretions and complications imposed, as many believed, on Christ's teachings by the institutions of the church. The Franciscan and Dominican orders were originally born out of their founders’ desire for a purer form of Christian faith. The great Dominican friary of San Marco – where Savonarola lived and preached in Florence – is still a place where you can see how their venerable ideals were given visual expression, by painter Fra Angelico, at around the time of Botticelli’s birth in the 1440s. Each of the monastic cells in that building is decorated with a single fresco, usually of the crucified Christ, on which the occupant was supposed to meditate while praying. Given Botticelli’s close links to Savonarola and the Dominicans in Florence, he must have had those self-same images in his mind when he created his Man of Sorrows. His picture is a panel painting, not a fresco, but it does exactly what Fra Angelico’s frescoes had done: presenting the image of Christ with hallucinatory directness, as an aid to intense private devotion.

Yet there is a certain edge to Botticelli’s painting that we do not find in earlier comparable pictures. I suspect that this may have a great deal to do with the millennial fears that haunted the late 15th-century mind, stemming from the belief that the end of the world really might be just around the corner. Botticelli himself shared that belief, as we know from an inscription on the National Gallery’s Mystic Nativity: “I Sandro made this picture in the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy in the half time after the time ... in the second woe of the Apocalypse during the loosing of the devil...”

A sense of impending apocalypse was widespread in Europe around the year 1500, and Botticelli was not the only painter to give expression to it. We find a similar sense of awe, mingled with dread, in the composition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, more or less contemporary with The Man of Sorrows – and which, both in its starkness of design and full-face portrayal of the Saviour, seems directly comparable with Botticelli’s work.

A less obvious example, perhaps, but equally compelling, is Albrecht Dürer’s well-known Self-Portrait in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich: a hypnotically intense picture, in which I have always thought that Dürer, with his flowing hair and beard and solemn, sorrowful expression, intended to paint himself in character as Jesus. That might sound sacreligious, but I think the opposite is true. The picture was the artist’s way of making visible his devotion and his determination to follow Christ’s path, to emulate him so closely that he might become his image on earth.

Is it a coincidence that Dürer should have painted his self-portrait as Christ in 1500, “the half time after the time”, at just the time that Botticelli was painting his own vision of The Man of Sorrows? I very much doubt it. The idea that the only road to salvation, in a darkening world, was to cleave to Christ, to make Christ a personal example, was unimaginably powerful in the world of the late-15th and early-16th centuries.

Botticelli’s The Man of Sorrows will be offered at Sotheby’s annual Masters Week sales series in New York in January 2022.

Past Auction

Master Paintings & Sculpture Part I

27 January 2022 | 10:00 AM EST | New York