Virgen de las Gracias

This small panel was painted around 1470, early in Botticelli's career in Florence, and shows the Virgin holding the infant Christ as he clutches at her chest. For a long time hardly anyone could see it. It had passed into private hands and hung, largely unrecognised, in a family's keeping near Naples, where it picked up scratches and losses of paint, some of them blamed on the 1982 earthquake and later house moves. In November 2023 Italian investigators recovered the panel and confirmed it as a genuine Botticelli, putting its value at more than 100 million euros. Tradition holds that the model for the Madonna was Simonetta Vespucci, the Florentine beauty Botticelli is said to have admired, and that the picture was made as a gift connected to Pope Sixtus IV.