La Santísima Trinidad

This altarpiece was painted for a very particular audience. In Florence around 1491 it hung in the church of Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, a refuge for women who had left prostitution behind, the convertite, the converted. Their patron was Mary Magdalene, and Botticelli puts her at the foot of the cross, gaunt and wrapped in her own long hair, a penitent the women there were meant to see themselves in. These were the years the friar Savonarola was preaching against luxury and vanity in the city, and Botticelli's late work grows harder and more severe, further from the soft grace of his Venus. Recent cleaning found the crucified Christ had been reworked more than once as the painting took shape.