Sandro Botticelli valuation
The Birth of Venus and Primavera, and the Florentine Madonnas his busy workshop painted for private devotion.
Sandro Botticelli (about 1445–1510) was born Alessandro Filipepi in Florence and trained with Fra Filippo Lippi.
What a work by Sandro Botticelli is worth
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Bio
Sandro Botticelli (about 1445–1510) was born Alessandro Filipepi in Florence and trained with Fra Filippo Lippi. He worked for the Medici and their circle, for whom he painted Primavera and The Birth of Venus, both now in the Uffizi, and in 1481–82 he was one of the painters called to Rome to fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel. In his later years his style became more austere and intense, a change often linked to the preacher Savonarola, and he made a celebrated series of drawings illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy. His reputation faded after his lifetime and was revived in the nineteenth century, when Ruskin, Walter Pater and the Pre-Raphaelites made him one of the best-loved painters of the Renaissance.
Botticelli ran one of the busiest workshops in Florence, which turned out Madonnas, often in the round tondo format, for private houses, so many of the paintings that come to market are catalogued as by Botticelli and his workshop, or by the workshop alone, with the share of his own hand deciding the value. His followers and imitators, from the anonymous masters art historians have named after their paintings to the forgers who traded on his revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, account for a large part of the market. Autograph portraits and devotional panels do occasionally appear, and the condition of the panel and the extent of later restoration matter as much as the attribution.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
