Madonna and Child

This is Botticelli near the very beginning, probably around 1465, when he was still a young apprentice in the busy Florentine workshop of Filippo Lippi. Lippi had made a particular kind of Madonna fashionable in the city, a warm, human mother holding a real child rather than a stiff golden icon, and here the pupil follows his master closely, in the soft modelling of the face and the quiet tenderness of the pose. The famous Botticelli of the mythologies, the swaying line and the pale goddesses, is still years away. The type of Virgin he paints here was one Lippi had worked out and countless Florentine painters were copying at the time.