La Vierge à l'Enfant

Around 1460 Filippo Lippi did something quietly new with a subject painters had handled a thousand times. He set the Virgin and Child in front of an actual window, with a landscape of rock and water opening behind them, instead of the flat gold ground earlier altarpieces used. Mary is young and very human, her hands together, looking at the child rather than out at us, while two angels hold him up and one of them grins straight at the viewer. Lippi was a Carmelite friar whose vows sat lightly on him; he'd run off with a nun, Lucrezia Buti, who is often thought to be the model here. A young apprentice in his workshop was watching closely and would carry this soft, real Madonna forward. His name was Botticelli.