Madonna and Child with an Angel

This is Botticelli before he was Botticelli. He painted it around 1465, barely 20 years old and still learning in the Florence workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi, and it shows how closely he was copying his master. The soft, slightly wistful face of the Virgin, the delicate hands, the way an angel steadies the Christ Child, all of it is pure Lippi, borrowed from the older man's own Madonnas. The famous Botticelli of the Primavera and the Venus, with those long flowing lines all his own, is still 15 years off. Ajaccio in Corsica owns it because it came from the collection of Cardinal Fesch, Napoleon's uncle, who built one of the largest private art collections of his day.