The Coronation of the Virgin (1490вЂ“92), Sandro Botticelli. This meeting of gold-ground panel and gilded youth is a juxtaposition that would not have seemed out of place to Botticelli and his contemporaries. But for others, including Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, this collage is a Botticellian invention that marries the tastes for icons and antiques in later 15th-century Florence. For some, this painting is an ahistorical amalgamation of alien elements, created to appeal to the modern art market, with the roundel perhaps replacing a damaged pastiglia medal similar to that in BotticelliвЂ™s earlier portrait. The precisely incised lines that encircle the insertionвЂ™s painted frame and the lack of damage to the surrounding paintwork indicate that the young man has always held a foreign object. The technical evidence as to whether BotticelliвЂ™s portrait was designed to include this particular object, set in its perfectly sized incision, remains equivocal. The saintвЂ™s delicately tooled halo is similar to the punchwork decoration on a fragmentary panel of an angel, also thought to come from that polyptych, and his shoulders are framed by two vertical lines of small, circular incisions, suggesting that this roundel was once rectangular, or perhaps gabled in shape. It is possible that the roundel may have belonged to the uppermost section of this work. In the 1340s Bulgarini painted a polyptych for the Covoni family in Florence, possibly for the family chapel in Santa Croce. The panel may have been cut into its roundel вЂ“ a format associated with ancient coins or portrait medals inspired by antiquity вЂ“ in preparation for its insertion into BotticelliвЂ™s painting. We might surmise that BulgariniвЂ™s balding saint is the same silent figure.

This panel, with its figure dressed in similar blue-grey robes and proffering the same two-fingered gesture, contains the cut-off traces of a red-lettered scroll, which would have once identified him as an Old Testament prophet. However, a fragmentary gabled panel of another balding bearded figure, which was offered and then withdrawn from sale at SothebyвЂ™s in New York in 2014, may provide a clue. Any original inscription identifying BulgariniвЂ™s saint has long been lost or removed. BotticelliвЂ™s portrait of 1474 of a man holding a pastiglia medal of Cosimo deвЂ™ Medici is the only other surviving example in the artistвЂ™s oeuvre of a show and tell, proclaiming friendship, loyalty or devotion, with the subject holding up an object for our inspection. Is the roundel original to BotticelliвЂ™s conception of this portrait? If so, it may well have held particular significance for the sitter or his family. The question of how these two paintings came together is a matter of some debate. Private collection Photo: courtesy SothebyвЂ™s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel (late 1470sвЂ“mid 1480s), Sandro Botticelli.

This balding saint, sporting a long, forked greying beard, extracts one hand from his grey-blue robes to give us a two-fingered gesture of silence вЂ“ the 15th-century equivalent of a finger to the lips. This painting within the painting presents another head-and-shoulders portrait of sorts, painted some 140 years earlier by the Sienese artist Bartolomeo Bulgarini ( fl. His long fingers grasp the panel, steadying its shining circular frame on his fictive ledge that separates his world from ours. Yet in his hands, this handsome young man presents us with a small roundel, a gilded fragment. His golden-brown hair hangs to his shoulders, framed in a window of serene blue sky. The dashing sitter of this painting, which dates to the late 1470s or first half of the 1480s, is an embodiment of clear-eyed, well-dressed youth, cut from the same crushed velvet cloth as that poster boy of BotticelliвЂ™s Florence, Giuliano deвЂ™ Medici. In January 2021, a portrait of a young man by Sandro Botticelli sold at SothebyвЂ™s New York for $92m, a new record for the artistвЂ™s work.

Small window collage picture frame