Agony in the Garden

Around 1500 Florence had just lived through the rule of Girolamo Savonarola, the friar who preached against luxury and had Florentines burn their fine things in the street. Botticelli, who had once painted Venus rising from the sea, turned in these years to plain, sombre religious pictures like this small night scene of Christ praying in the garden while his disciples sleep. How it reached Spain is telling. It entered the collection of Queen Isabella the Catholic, and today it hangs in the Royal Chapel of Granada, the church built over her tomb and that of her husband Ferdinand. It is a modest panel, barely half a metre tall, made for private prayer rather than public show.