A rare early work by Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli has been acquired by the Klesch Collection in London after an export bar was placed on the masterpiece in 2025. It will now go on public display for the first time in 80 years at the Ashmolean Museum. The last time it was exhibited, at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Birmingham in 1945, it was attributed to the master’s workshop, but the current scholarship and new imaging studies show complexity and detail in the preparatory drawing evident in known autograph works by the master himself.
The Virgin and Child Enthroned was painted around 1470, early in the carrer of Mariano Filipepi, aka Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445–1510). It depicts the Virgin seated on a throne with the Christ Child on her knee. They sit under an architectural canopy with gilded columns and marble inlays along the arch. The checkered marble floor recedes under the Virgin’s feet to a one point perspective confirmed by imaging investigations that revealed the underlying drawings and perspective lines. The composition is similar in style to Botticelli’s Sant’Ambrogio altarpiece currently in the Uffizi, particularly the design of the Child and the position of the Virgin’s hands holding him. Art historians believe the Virgin and Child Enthroned was also an altarpiece, albeit on a smaller scale, intended for a more intimate private chapel.
By the early 19th century, it was in the oratory of the Convent of San Giuliano in Florence. After the Napoleonic suppression of the convent in 1808, the property was bought by the Calasanz monastic order and the painting was then moved to the chapel of a convalescent home for sick brothers of the order in a village outside of Florence. The property, including the painting, was inherited by the Graziani family and in 1903 Giovanni Magherini Graziani sold it to Florence art dealer Elia Volpi. She sold it to heiress, philanthropist and art collector Harriet Loyd-Lindsay, Baroness Wantage, in 1904, and Virgin and Child Enthroned moved to England.
Lady Wantage’s famed collection was largely dispersed after her death in 1920, the most important works sold at Sotheby’s in 1945, but this Madonna by Botticelli was kept by her descendants in Betterton House, Berkshire, until they put it up for sale in 2024. The painting was published, but only known from black and white photos and when it was mentioned its location was even listed incorrectly. The sale spurred new research, material analysis, X-rays and infrared reflectography imaging that reclaimed the work as a masterpiece of international significance.
It was sold at auction at Sotheby’s London on December, 4, 2024 for a final sale price of £10 million ($12.6 million), blasting past the presale estimate of £2-3 million. There are very few works by Botticelli in the United Kingdom and this one is not only of exceptional importance due to its early date, but also due to its relevance to the history of Old Master collecting in the country. Because of these factors, when a foreign buyer won the auction and applied for an export license, the UK’s Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism imposed a temporary export ban in 2025. The Klesch Collection stepped up to the plate and was able acquire the painting for the nation.
* This article was originally published here
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