Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, called Sandro Botticelli

The following condition report has been provided by Karen Thomas of Thomas Art Conservation LLC., 336 West 37th Street, Suite 830, New York, NY 10018, 212-564-4024, info@thomasartconservation.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This handsome depiction of an angel is in a very good state of preservation, especially given its history, and has been fairly recently restored. The transfer process is risky and as a result paintings can suffer considerably in the process; happily in this case the paint layers are generally well preserved. The high quality restoration focuses on losses related to the original panel construction, including joins running diagonally across the upper half of the picture, on scattered small losses, and on reducing the appearance of an artist's change to the angel's hair. Because the original support was round, the upper right corner of the composition has been extended to square the corner, while a passage of restoration in the bottom left conceals a portion of a disembodied arm. A small-scale network of lifting cracks has developed in a portion of the restoration on the bottom left. A few areas of tenting follow the grain of the new secondary wood support: to the left of the head, near the left side eyebrow and in the bottom right corner. The varnish is slightly cloudy, although this is only noticeable under a strong light. The paint layers are adhered to a non-original fine weave canvas which is in turn adhered to a horizontally-grained wood panel. The panel has been thinned, unpainted wood strips have been attached to the perimeter of the secondary support, and the entirety has been cradled. Conservation treatment to secure tenting paint and lifting in the bottom left is recommended but otherwise the painting can be hung in its current state.
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A rare discovery, this delightfully engaging depiction of an angel is a new addition to the corpus of Sandro Botticelli, one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance.  The painting dates to circa 1495-1500 and marks a significant moment in Botticelli’s late career when he was beginning to experiment with the medium of oil.  While by this point oil had been used in Italian art for some time and had even been employed by assistants within Botticelli’s workshop, the master himself had traditionally preferred to work in tempera.  It is intriguing to see Botticelli’s exploration of the new medium as he interweaves with the techniques required for both tempera and oil.

The fragment once formed part of a tondo, most likely depicting the same composition as the Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and an Angel, executed by members of Botticelli’s workshop, in the National Gallery, London (fig. 1; inv. no. NG275).  The London tondo depicts the same angel at right, his head tilted forward in a similar manner to allow for the inward curve of the panel’s rounded edge.  At some point in the last century, the present painting was modified and an addition was appended to the upper right corner, giving the panel a rectangular format.  When observed in raking light, the curve of the tondo’s original edge is still faintly visible beside the angel’s hair. 

Infrared reflectography (fig. 2) provides a fascinating insight into the panel’s original format.  Not only is the curved edge instantly perceptible, but prominent diagonal lines display the typically idiosyncratic structure of panels used by Botticelli, and the characteristic oblique wooden boards of one intended as a tondo.  Orienting the wood grain at an angle was a deliberate decision as the stress and weight of the panel could be distributed more evenly.  Since a tondo has no flat edge, the weight of the entire panel falls on one point and if that point were to coincide with a vertically or horizontally aligned grain, the panel might be more likely to split or warp.  Also evident under IRR are changes to the angel’s hair, most likely made by Botticelli himself.  Once more voluminous, the hair was brought closer to the angel’s head at the crown and the right side and the more outlying curls have been tamed.  In the lower left section of the IRR image is an area of dark paint that has since been painted out.  According to the composition of the London panel this would have been the point at which the mantle of the Virgin originally overlapped the angel’s sleeve.

We are grateful to Professor Laurence Kanter for his invaluable assistance in the cataloguing of this lot upon firsthand inspection.