La Virgen y el Niño con la corona de espinas y tres clavos

Botticelli painted this tender scene in Florence around 1477, in the years he was becoming the city's favourite painter of the Virgin. A mother holds her child at a window that opens onto a landscape at dusk, and the light seems to come less from the sky than from the two figures themselves. But the sweetness carries a warning. Set nearby are a crown of thorns and three nails, the instruments of the Crucifixion, so a viewer meeting this infant is meant to remember, even here, how his life will end. Florentine households wanted images like this for private prayer, intimate enough to live with in a bedroom or a study. Botticelli gives the mother the long neck and downcast calm that would become his signature.