The Virgin Adoring the Child

Around 1490 Florence was turning anxious. The friar Girolamo Savonarola was preaching against luxury and vanity from the city's pulpits, and within a few years his followers would be burning fine objects on public bonfires. Botticelli, who had painted Venus and the pagan gods for the Medici, spent these years more and more on quiet devotional images like this round panel. Mary kneels with her hands pressed together, gazing down at the infant Christ laid on the ground before her, the whole scene held in a circle a little under two feet across. It is painted in tempera, egg-bound colour built up in fine strokes. Behind the figures a low wall opens onto a plain stretch of Tuscan landscape.