Botticelli returns to Oxford after UK export scare
Sandro Botticelli’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned is now on view at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford after facing the risk of leaving the UK earlier this year. The painting, last shown there in the 1930s, has also emerged from conservation with clearer details and cooler tones.
Dating from the 1470s, the work was bought by the London-based Klesch Collection, which said in May that it would loan the painting to the Ashmolean for three years. The museum had shown it before in 1934–35, when it was still attributed to Botticelli’s workshop.
In May 2025, the UK government imposed an export bar on the painting, then valued at £10.2m. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport set a recommended price of £9,960,000, plus recoverable VAT for an eligible institution, after the work sold at Sotheby’s London in late 2024 for £9.7m including fees.
Summer conservation removed discoloured varnish and later retouching, the Ashmolean said, bringing back well-preserved details of the Virgin and Child. For artists and drawing enthusiasts, the point is what becomes legible again: the structure beneath the paint, the handling of gold leaf, and Botticelli’s way of balancing devotional image-making with a finely judged coolness of tone.
The painting’s long journey also matters. It moved from Florence to a small rural chapel, then through private ownership in Italy and England before being kept at Betterton House near Wantage from 1944, and its return to Oxford shows how conservation, attribution and display can reshape the way an old master is seen.
Source : The Art Newspaper