When Suzy Lewis, the granddaughter of the physicist and inventor Thomas Merton, saw that Botticelli’s
Portrait of a Young Man with a Roundel (“just looking so gorgeous”) was up for sale again, it came as “such a shock”.
In December 1982, the family estate sent it to auction at Christie’s. It proved an “absolute disaster”, Lewis says, and sold for just £810,000 it was expected to make “infinitely more”. Everything had been prepared for the portrait to go to the Getty, Lewis says: the family had even been advised to delay the sale until the Getty was ready to buy, which they duly did. But the night before the sale, the