The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child

Botticelli painted this around 1485, the same handful of years that gave us his Birth of Venus, when Florence under the Medici was as confident and worldly as any city in Europe. He set the Virgin in an enclosed garden of thornless roses, an old sign of her purity, kneeling not over a lively infant but a sleeping one. That sleep is the point. A child shown asleep like this was understood to foreshadow the dead Christ, and the small plants around him carry the same meaning, the red strawberries read as drops of his blood. Unusually for Botticelli it is painted on canvas rather than wood panel, most likely for quiet private prayer at home. In 1999 it nearly left Scotland for a museum in Texas, until a public appeal matched the asking price within days.