A drawing by Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli has sold for a record £1.3 million at auction.

The 15th-century Study for a seated St Joseph, his head resting on his right hand fetched £1,314,500 at Sotheby's in London.
The auction house said it was the highest price ever paid for a work on paper by the Florentine artist.
It was also the first Botticelli drawing to be auctioned since the 19th century and the last of his drawings that remained in private hands.
The previous owner was Polish-born art connoisseur and philanthropist Barbara Piasecka Johnson, who died last year.
Over 30 years, the wife of Johnson and Johnson heir John Seward Johnson assembled an astounding collection of Old Master and recent artworks.
She bought Study for a Seated St Joseph, which shows the figure of a bearded man in a pensive pose, for $88,000 at Sotheby's in New York in 1988.
It means that the price fetched last night was more than five times the figure paid in 1988.
The record-breaking work is also the only drawing which can be clearly linked with one of Botticelli's painted compositions.
It was a study for The Nativity with adoring St John the Baptist, a "tondo" circular painting dating from the late 1480s which is at Buscot Park country house near Faringdon, Oxfordshire.

 

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