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 Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder resembles this. He is also sometimes claimed to be the subject of other Botticelli portraits, with completely different features (e.g. Pitti Palace, wearing a chaperon). The appearance at auction in 1982, from the Thomas Merton collection, of a rarely seen painting by Botticelli of a young man identified (with no real evidence) as Giovanni il Popolano in a similar pose, holding up a round medallion cut from a much older painting (albeit of a bearded saint, not Cosimo), has led to speculation that this might be a companion piece, and thus that the young man in this portrait is possibly