Sotheby’s will offer Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece The Man of Sorrows at a January auction in New York, where the painting of a resurrected Christ is expected to fetch more than US$40 million. Created in the late 15th or early 16th century by the famed Renaissance artist, the work is set to star in an Old Masters week sale series, Sotheby’s announced Wednesday. The auction follows an exhibition launching this month in Hong Kong.
Sotheby’s described The Man of Sorrows as “the defining masterpiece of Botticelli’s late career” in promotional materials. The painting was once owned by an English opera singer and her family and is now part of a private U.S. collection. It hits the auction block a year after Sotheby’s record-setting US$92.2 million sale of Botticelli’s Young Man Holding a Roundel in January 2021.
