Madonna and Child

Around 1490 this round panel hung in a Medici country house, the Villa di Castello outside Florence. It was very likely ordered by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, the same young patron then buying Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus for those same walls. The Virgin sits on the grass playing with her child, and that part is gentle enough. Behind them is something you rarely find in a Madonna, a cluster of nude figures, some standing, some reclining, filling the far ground. One reading is that they are humankind in the age before the Law of Moses, still waiting. If those muscular nudes look familiar, the Uffizi has an answer close at hand. Michelangelo set very similar ones behind his own Holy Family, the Doni Tondo, which hangs a few rooms away.