Madonna and Child and the Young St John the Baptist

Botticelli made devotional pictures like this near the end of his life, in a Florence very different from the one of his famous mythologies. In the 1490s the city had fallen under the preacher Savonarola, who denounced worldly art and had luxuries burned in the public square before he was himself executed in 1498. Botticelli's late religious paintings turn plainer and more fervent, the sweetness of his earlier work pulled tight. The Madonna bends over the Christ child while the young John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence, presses close, a pairing Florentine families asked for again and again in their homes. Tempera was by now the old way of painting, oil steadily replacing it, and Botticelli kept to it to the last.