The Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist

Dresden bought this panel in London in 1874, out of an English private collection and through a dealer named Pinti. The date is the interesting part. For a long stretch after the 16th century Botticelli's name meant almost nothing to collectors, and the change is usually dated to the early 1870s in Britain, after the Oxford critic Walter Pater published an essay on him. Within a few years Florentine devotional pictures of this kind were moving through the London trade. The painting itself had been made in Florence in the late 1490s. Mary stands at a prayer desk with the child on her arm, and the young John the Baptist is beside them with his hands joined. Bodies and drapery are pared down to a few essential lines, which is close to what Florentine taste of the time meant by beauty. It has hung in Dresden under his own name ever since, as gallery number 8.