NEW YORK (AP) — An enigmatic painting from Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli will go on auction next year and art watchers will be seeing if it fetches more than its eye-watering $80 million estimate, despite the pandemic. Botticelli’s 15th-century portrait of a nobleman in “Young Man Holding a Roundel” is the highlight of Sotheby’s Masters Week sale series in New York in January. Opportunities to acquire a Botticelli — behind such masterpieces as “Primavera” and “The Birth of Venus” — are very rare. The auction house believes it could get over $100 million. The last painting to achieve that level at auction was Claude Monet’s “Meules” in 2019, going for $110 million.
