Virgen con el Niño

Filippo Strozzi spent his childhood in exile and came back to Florence in 1466, then spent 20 years buying his family's standing back in stone and paint. In 1487 he hired Filippino Lippi to fresco his chapel in Santa Maria Novella. In 1489 he laid the first stone of the Palazzo Strozzi. This small panel came earlier, around 1483, and appears to have been painted for him, for a room rather than an altar. The Virgin sits indoors with a window open behind her onto a river valley, and the surface is tempera and oil together with gold, the old method and the new one on the same board. Jules Bache left it to the Metropolitan in 1949, and after a cleaning the Museum gave it a show of its own in 2011.