A 'mystery' Botticelli will be put up
for sale at auction at Sotheby's in New York later this month.
Analysis of the Renaissance painter's Man of Sorrows, a picture
of Christ with the signs of the Passion, shows that is conceals
a half-rubbed-out Madonna and Child.
The Botticelli has a reserve price of 40 million dollars.
It will go under the hammer on January 27, the same day as
Andrea del Sarto's recently rediscovered Portrait of a Gentleman
and two works by Artemisia Gentileschi from the collection of
Geneva banker J.E. Safra.
But the Botticelli is expected to be the star of the auction.
It goes on sale a year and a day after an anonymous Asian
collector paid 92 million dollars for Botticelli's Portrait of a
Gentleman.
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