The Adoration of the Christ Child

Around 1500 Botticelli was an aging master in a changed Florence. The fiery preacher Savonarola, who had urged Florentines to burn their vanities, had been hanged and burned in the city's main square just two years earlier, and a new religious seriousness runs through Botticelli's late work. This large round panel, about four feet across, shows the newborn Christ laid on his mother's cloak as she kneels in prayer and Joseph sleeps nearby. Two shepherds approach from the right with a lamb, and far off to the left the family already flees into Egypt. The graceful curved bodies of Mary and Joseph echo the circle of the frame. Parts of it were likely finished by hands in his workshop.