Madonna and Child and Two Angels

This is early Botticelli, from around 1468, when he was a young painter still working close to his teacher. The whole design, the Virgin with the Christ Child and two angels crowded into a shallow space, comes almost straight out of Filippo Lippi, the master whose workshop shaped him. Lippi's version of this arrangement had been a hit, copied again and again, and here you can watch the pupil taking it up and making it his own. That closeness once confused people. The panel was for a time given to Filippino Lippi, the master's own son, before it was recognised as the work of the young Botticelli. It now hangs in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.