Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist

This round painting, a tondo, was made around 1490 not for a church but for a well-off Florentine household, where such circular panels of the Virgin hung in a bedroom or private room as an object of daily prayer. The two children are Christ and the young John the Baptist, who by local tradition was Florence's own patron saint, so a family here was greeting both their Saviour and their city's protector. Botticelli ran a busy workshop by this date, and scholars think he painted the faces and the thin veil himself while an assistant filled in the Virgin's blue robe. It is the same decade Savonarola began preaching in Florence against worldly display, a mood that would soon push Botticelli toward the starker religious pictures of his last years.