Sandro Botticelli His only large painting with a mythological subject ever to be sold on the open market is the "Venus and Mars", bought at Christie's by the National Gallery for a rather modest £1,050 in 1874. The first nineteenth-century art historian to be enthusiastic about Botticelli's Sistine frescoes was Alexis-François Rio; Anna Brownell Jameson and Charles Eastlake were alerted to Botticelli as well, and works by his hand began to appear in German collections. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood incorporated elements of his work into their own. Walter Pater created a literary picture of Botticelli, who was then taken up by the Aesthetic
Portrait of a Young Woman (Botticelli, Frankfurt) similar Botticelli paintings are to be found in the National Gallery, London, the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, and in the Marubeni Collection, Tokyo. David Alan Brown of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. describes the painting as of an ideally beautiful young woman mythologised as a nymph or goddess, a view reflected in the title given it by the Städel. It belongs to a group of such paintings by Botticelli or his workshop. The art historian Aby Warburg first suggested the painting was an idealised portrait of Simonetta Vespucci. It is suggested that Quattrocento paintings of hair and water are