Madonna mit Kind, sechs Engeln und dem Knaben Johannes dem Täufer

This is a tondo, a round painting, and around 1489 that circular shape was the fashionable thing to hang in a well-off Florentine household, a devotional image that doubled as a mark of taste. Botticelli's busy workshop turned out a good number of them, and this one carries his design with his own hand in places. Six angels holding white lilies, the flower of the Virgin's purity, lean along a low balustrade and sing, dividing the picture across the middle. Below, Mary tends the Child while the infant John the Baptist looks on. The whole arrangement bends itself to fit the circle, the heads and haloes curving with the frame. It later passed into the Roman collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, where it still hangs today.