The last Botticelli in private hands hits the market, with a catch

Botticelli’s Portrait of Michele Marullo Tarcaniota is held at an undisclosed location in London before it emerges in the market next month.Arrigo Coppitz

Botticelli’s portrait of the Renaissance warrior-poet Michele Marullo sits in an armoured art warehouse in central London. It’s a minor masterpiece and, when it emerges next month, is expected to whip up a lot of enthusiasm among Old Masters collectors. That’s because Botticellis are almost impossible to buy.

The sponsor of the sale, the Trinity Fine Art gallery of London and Milan, bills the painting as “The Last Botticelli,” meaning it is almost certainly the artist’s only work in private hands outside Italy that is available for purchase. Trinity owner Carlo Orsi called the interest in the painting “unbelievable,” with serious expressions of interest from U.S., Chinese and European collectors, especially Spanish ones; the piece is owned by a wealthy Spanish family from Barcelona.

He thinks the price will reach US$30-million, marking the biggest test for famous Renaissance artists since 2017’s blockbuster, US$450-million sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which may or may not be owned by the Saudi royal family (its whereabouts are unknown).

There’s just one catch – and it’s a big one: Botticelli’s Portrait of Michele Marullo Tarcaniota is in London on a temporary Spanish export licence, and there are no guarantees the Spanish Culture Ministry will allow the treasure, an artistic icon, to leave the country permanently. Non-Spanish buyers beware. “I don’t know, but maybe something can happen,” Mr. Orsi said.

I saw the painting in London early this week on the condition that I not disclose the location of the warehouse, a plain brick building equipped with rolling steel doors.

Portrait of Michele Marullo Tarcaniota is quite small, at 49 centimetres by 35 centimetres.Arrigo Coppitz

The Botticelli, painted circa 1500, has a fairly large room to itself, befitting its rarity and value. The painting is quite small, at 49 centimetres by 35 centimetres.

We turned off the lights so we could use an ultraviolet flashlight to examine its restoration marks, which are fairly extensive, but do not overwhelm the portrait. Based on the Cyrillic inscription on the back of the canvas, the last dated restoration took place at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where it hung for some time until 1904.

Casual fans of Botticelli – who was born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi in Florence in 1444 – would not immediately recognize the portrait as his work. Visitors to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence are dazzled by his Birth of Venus, a mythological painting that depicts the goddess of love and beauty in all her ethereal, naked splendour. His Primavera, also in the Uffizi, is an ornate and sophisticated allegorical celebration of spring with nine figures and some 200 different types of flowers. It is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Western art. His frescoes in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel may not be as well known as Michelangelo’s, but are nonetheless big tourist draws.

By comparison, his Marullo is austere, simple even, and I found it mesmerizing. Marullo is middle-aged. His hair is unkempt, his eyelids heavy. He is dressed in black. The background is plain. The focus is on his face, with its slight sneer and eyes focused intently on the viewer, “almost in defiance of the world,” according to U.S. art historian Carl Brandon Strehlke, who wrote the catalogue for the sale. “Botticelli’s other known male portraits are mostly of golden youth – good-looking young men, who were part of the many brigades of revellers that surrounded the [Florentine court of] the young Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici.”

According to the Cyrillic inscription on the back of the canvas, the last dated restoration took place at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.Arrigo Coppitz

Botticelli’s Marullo is the only known portrait of the fighting poet. He was probably born in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, just before the city fell to the Ottoman Turks, and spent his youth in Dubrovnik. By his late teens he was a mercenary, fighting the Turks in Thrace, Scythia and southern Italy.

He was also a humanist poet whose verses, hymns and epigrams caught the attention of the House of Medici during the height of the family’s, and Florence’s, greatest cultural power, during the late 1400s. Art scholars believe he knew Botticelli. Marullo married a wealthy Florentine, Alessandra Scala, in 1496. Mr. Strehlke believes she commissioned the portrait shortly after his death in 1500, when he drowned crossing a river on horseback in Tuscany.

For centuries, the painting bounced around Europe as Botticelli’s fame faded. At one point, it was in the art collection of Eugène de Beauharnais, the adopted son of Napoleon. After stints in St. Petersburg, London and Berlin, it was bought by a Catalan politician, businessman and art collector named Francesc d’Assis Cambo i Batlle. The Marullo was one of three Botticellis he owned; The other two hang in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Marullo was there until 2016, with side trips to New York, Frankfurt and Berlin for exhibitions.

It is not known why the Cambo family, which has owned the portrait for almost a century, wants to sell the piece. What appears certain is that they are interested in a discreet sale, where they can closely monitor the process and choose the buyer, rather than pushing it onto the global market through a high-profile public auction handled by Christie’s or Sotheby’s, the brokers that dominate the art-auction world.

Botticelli’s Marullo is the only known portrait of the Renaissance warrior-poet who drowned crossing a river on horseback in Tuscany.Arrigo Coppitz/Handout

Trinity, founded in 1984 by former Sotheby’s directors, is a small shop that specializes in Old Masters from the Renaissance to the 19th century. “The Cambo family will have the final say on the sale,” said Alexandra Toscano, Mr. Orsi’s deputy in London.

The last significant Botticelli – the so-called Rockefeller Madonna – hit the market in 2013, selling at a Christie’s auction for US$10.4-million, a record for a Botticelli, though not a price that lit up the art world. The value reflected the belief that big parts of the painting were executed by Botticelli’s assistants. The Marullo is thought to be entirely the work of Botticelli himself.

The work will be displayed by Trinity at the Frieze Masters art fair in London in early October. Mr. Orsi hopes Spanish bidders prove aggressive, all the better to avoid a fight for a permanent export licence. “I don’t have a preferred buyer but would be happy with a collector who would keep the painting in Spain,” he said.

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