The Virgin and the Child in a niche

Botticelli ran one of the busiest workshops in Florence in the 1470s, and Madonnas like this one went out its door in numbers, painted with his assistants and, in places, his own brush. The Virgin sits in a shallow stone niche, her head tilted toward the child with the sweet, faraway look that is Botticelli's signature. Tradition has long tied that face to Simonetta Vespucci, a young Florentine woman famous for her beauty, who died in 1476 and whose features people read into many of his women. In 2009 the scholar Luciano Bellosi accepted this panel into the list of genuine Botticelli works. It hangs now far from Florence, in Mexico City.