The Virgin and Child

Around 1470 Botticelli was a young painter just making his own way after training in the Florentine workshops, and this small devotional Madonna belongs to those early years. It follows a design worked out by his older master, Andrea del Verrocchio, whose studio turned out popular images of the Virgin and Child set behind a low ledge. When the French collector Nélie Jacquemart bought the panel in Florence in the 19th century, she was sure she had acquired a Verrocchio, and the attribution to the young Botticelli came only later, after his early work had been studied closely. The tender, slightly grave faces and the plain, careful composition are the marks of that beginning, before the flowing line of the mythologies he would paint a decade later.