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Sotheby’s came out ahead in London’s Classics Week thanks to The Virgin and Child Enthroned, an early work by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510). The work led the auction house’s Old Master evening sale on December 4, selling for £9.96 million (about $12.6 million), including fees, making it the Italian artist’s fifth-most-expensive work sold at auction.

The sale marked the masterpiece’s first time under the hammer. Nine would-be buyers engaged in a bidding war for the guaranteed work, which eventually hammered at £8.6 million ($10.9 million), more than four times its low estimate of $2.5 million (presale estimates do not include fees, sale prices do).

The gilded mixed-media painting reemerged after 120 years in the private collection of Lady Wantage, who in 1904 paid £5,000 (roughly $655,000, adjusted for historical inflation) for it. Also known as the Wantage Madonna, it was long thought to be from the workshop of Botticelli. Yet recent analysis using X-radiography and infrared reflectography confirmed it as an early work by the master himself. Linked to his 1470 Sant’Ambrogio altarpiece, the smaller painting was likely created for private worship.

Van Dyck’s Andalusian Horse was painted around 1621. Courtesy of Christie’s.

Sotheby’s New York holds the record for the most expensive Botticelli ever sold at auction, according to the Artnet Price Database. It was set when Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel (about 1480) went for $92.1 million in 2021.

Featuring a total of 25 lots, the auction house’s London evening sale totaled £24 million ($30 million), besting the high end of its £19.4 million ($24.7 million) presale estimate. That’s a 25 percent increase from last year’s similarly sized sale.

Meanwhile, Christie’s Old Masters evening sale on December 3 brought in £13.9 million ($17.7 million), a 36 percent drop from the equivalent sale last year. A two-sided Anthony van Dyck work from about 1621, with Andalusian Horse and A Wooded Landscape, was the top lot of the night, selling for £3.4 million ($4.3 million). It had previously sold at auction in 2000 for £774,000 (around $1.8 million today).

A pair of portraits by Johann Joseph Zoffany, Flower Girl and Watercress Girl, sold for £991,000 ($1.3 million) at Bonhams Old Master paintings sale on December 4, far exceeding its £300,000–£500,000 estimate. The portraits accounted for 80 percent of the auction’s £1.6 million ($2 million) total.