| In the ongoing war between the Reddit hordes and hedge funds, here's a return either could only dream of: nearly 7,000%. On Thursday morning in New York, Sotheby's sold an impeccably preserved painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli for $92.2 million after auction house fees.  Sandro Botticelli, "Young Man Holding a Roundel" Source: Sotheby's The painting, widely considered to be the finest Botticelli in private hands, was executed around 1480 and depicts an elegant young man lightly holding a roundel of a saint. For the last 40 years, it had been in the possession of the late real estate developer Sheldon Solow, who purchased the work in 1982. Over time, the billionaire slowly donated fractions of the painting to his private foundation, saving his family some $33 million in capital gains taxes. Solow, who died in November at 92, purchased the work for $1.3 million, meaning the sale realized an appreciation of about 6,992%. The price exceeds all but a handful of old master sales and is more in line with the spectacular prices achieved for contemporary art. (The $450 million paid for Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi in 2017 is very much an outlier.) "It's something that's very modern, which can sit next to a Pollock or anything else important—even a Jeff Koons," says the Milanese dealer Carlo Orsi. "It feels very fresh."  When the gavel fell for $450 million on Leonardo's "Salvator Mundi," it set a record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images The Botticelli sale is another sign of a turbocharged art market that—like the stock market—seems to exist outside the realms of our current pandemic. The rich have been getting exponentially richer, adding $1.8 trillion to their combined net worth in 2020. And they're spending like never before. The buyer of the work was not immediately known, but rumor has it that it was a Russian oligarch. Stay tuned.  Illustration: Jaci Kessler Lubliner Illustration: Jaci Kessler Lubliner | 
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