Virgin and Child with Two Angels

This is a small round panel, the kind a Florentine family kept in a bedroom for private prayer. Two angels pull back curtains to reveal the Virgin and the blessing Christ Child, framed by slender trees. Botticelli painted it late in life, in the 1490s, as Florence was turning away from the worldly beauty of his famous mythologies. Those were the years the friar Savonarola preached against luxury and vanity from the city's pulpits, and Botticelli's own art grew plainer and more openly devout. The tempera is handled tenderly here, without the crowds and gold of a grand altarpiece. It may once have hung in the Florentine monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli.