Madonna and Child with Angels

Around 1470, Botticelli was in his mid-twenties, newly on his own after training with the painter Filippo Lippi and just opening a workshop in Florence. The Medici were the city's real power, and tender devotional Madonnas like this one were the commissions that paid a young painter's bills. Lippi's lesson is still visible in the soft, faintly melancholy faces, the Virgin's translucent veil, the angels crowding in close around the child. The gold-threaded halo and the fine, sure line drawing already point ahead to the linear grace of the Primavera and the Birth of Venus, both still more than a decade away. A small panel like this was made not for a church but for prayer in a private Florentine home.