Being Botticelli. Forgery

In the 19th century the painting techniques of Venus with three putti was thought to be by Sandro Botticelli. It was acquired by the Gallery with Botticelli’s famous Venus and Mars, although more was paid for the former work despite the fact that it is today the less well-known of the two pictures. The attribution of the painting now laconically entitled An Allegory has been downgraded, but this does not call into question its authenticity, however awkward and eccentric its design.

Two Botticellis?

In 1874 the sale of the collection of Alexander Barker, the son of a fashionable bootmaker, was eagerly watched in London. Even the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, wrote to Lady Bradford that he meant “to rise early tomorrow and go to Christie’s. If the Barker pictures are as rare and wondrous as I hear, it shall be hard if the nation does not possess them.”

Shortly after the auction, writing in the ‘Art Journal’, the art critic J.W. Comyns Carr eulogised over the “important specimens of Art of the early Italian schools” which had just been acquired from the collection. “Two designs by Botticelli complete the list of the works purchased”, he wrote, noting that “these represent the classical side of Botticelli’s genius, of which side the National Gallery had previously no example”.

One of the two ‘Botticellis’ that were acquired by the Gallery – his justly famous ‘Venus and Mars’– still hangs on the main floor; it is his most celebrated mythological art painting techniques outside of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. The other, ‘An Allegory’, has long been relegated to the lower floor and, until very recently, catalogued as ‘Follower of Sandro Botticelli’.

If price can be used as an indicator of aesthetic value, ’An Allegory’ was the more highly regarded painting when it was sold – it cost £600 more than ‘Venus and Mars’ (£1,627 10s as opposed to £1,050). Not everyone was enthralled by the painting, however. Shortly after the sale, Lady Eastlake wrote to the former Director, William Boxall, lamenting her fears: “[Burton, the new Director] has bought much that is second rate and much that is irreparably injured, and for enormous prices. That Venus and Amorini by S. Botticelli seems to me to be monstrous in price.”

Despite her disapproval, Lady Eastlake still believed that the painting was a work by Botticelli. Since 1899, however, its attribution has quite rightly been queried, and by 1951 the curator Martin Davies observed that “it is by some feeble imitator of Botticelli, and seems to be partly derived from Botticelli’s ‘Venus and Mars’”.