Madonna della Loggia

This is a very early Botticelli, made around 1467 when he was barely into his twenties and had just left the workshop of Filippo Lippi to move closer to the sculptor Verrocchio. The Virgin sits in a loggia, an open arched porch, her head tilted and her gaze lowered as the child reaches up to her neck. It is a small, quiet panel in tempera, the kind meant for private prayer in a Florentine bedroom rather than a public altar. You can already see the tenderness and the long, thoughtful faces that would later fill his famous mythologies, worked out here first on a modest scale.