The painting, ‘Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel’, is one of roughly a dozen of his portraits known to survive today.
Sotheby’s said it was one of the most significant portraits of any period ever to appear at auction and fetched the second-highest price for any Old Master painting.
At $586 million, ‘Salvator Mundi’, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, set the world record in 2017 for an Old Master or any work of art.
The painting was put up for auction by the family of late billionaire Sheldon Solow, one of the great builders of New York skyscrapers, who died in November.
It shows an unknown young man, likely a member of Florence’s elite in the late 15th century, dressed in a simple tunic with a blue sky behind him and holding a roundel, or medallion.
