What did you do during lockdown? When it all started in March 2020 I made many a resolution, most almost immediately abandoned, towards self-improvement, but one area I have kept up is study of the Italian Renaissance. Has there ever been any period of artistic history as astonishing as this one? And now a painting from one of the greatest masters of them all, Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, aka Sandro Botticelli, is coming to the market: on January 28th, Sotheby’s is selling Young Man Holding a Roudel.

It is estimated at $80 million and worth every penny of the price. I cannot understand the extortionate sums paid for contemporary art (actually I can: it’s all a game of smoke and mirrors designed to produce huge amounts of value out of nothing), but to own a Botticelli is the stuff that dreams are made of, albeit only for a dreamer with very deep pockets. There are only about 50 Botticellis left in the world, although some of them - Primavera, The Birth of Venus - are so famous that just about anyone would recognise them, even if they’d never seen a painting in their life. Botticelli spent years in the Medici Palace with Lorenzo de Medici as his patron, which is where he created these masterpieces and much more.

I hope this very rare and beautiful portrait finds a good home, although it must, initially at least, be through a private buyer as no museum could afford that. Perhaps someone will buy it and donate. And if you were wondering about the title of this blog, it comes from a Cambridge revue and was the party piece of the Right Reverend Simon Phipps, later Bishop of Lincoln, who studied at Trinity College. So did my father and it was he who first recited it to me:

I’m a Botticelli angel, and I’m bored

With looking quaint and faintly overawed.

I feel so bloody silly

Holding up my Eden Lilley

In that way that Botticelli so adored…

Of course there are no lilies in this painting. Gavels at the ready…

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