Virgin and Child

Around 1460 Filippo Lippi had a success on his hands, the Madonna with two angels now in the Uffizi, where one of the angels grins out at the viewer. This panel shows what he did next. X-rays reveal that he began it as a repeat of that composition and then changed course. The angels went, and mother and child were left alone together. The museum stresses how new this kind of devotional picture was in Florence. Mary sits on a throne in front of a painted window frame, so we seem to look out from inside a room onto a hazy landscape, with a round temple and a river winding into the distance. Her clothes follow the fashion of the day, and the closeness between the two figures has an everyday tenderness, which the museum sees as part of a slow secularising of the subject. Nobody knows who ordered it. The panel first surfaces in 1808, when Munich acquired it in Florence from an abbé named Rivanni.