Madonna in Herrlichkeit mit Seraphim

This is early Botticelli, painted around 1469, when he was barely out of his apprenticeship and still absorbing the workshop of Verrocchio, the Florentine master who also trained the young Leonardo. The Virgin holds the Christ child inside a golden almond of light, ringed by small red-winged seraphim. For a long time nobody knew it was his. The panel sat in the Uffizi's old inventories listed simply as anonymous. Only later did the historian Wilhelm von Bode recognise Botticelli's hand in it and place it just before his Fortitude of 1470, the first work he is documented as being paid for. The faces already carry the wistful, downturned expression that later collectors would come looking for.