Vierge à l'Enfant avec deux anges

Filippino Lippi grew up inside the family trade. His father, the painter Fra Filippo Lippi, died in 1469, when the boy was about 12, and he finished learning his craft in the Florence workshop of Sandro Botticelli. A small early Madonna like this one sits right on that seam. The soft faces and the careful landscape behind the window recall his father, while the sharper line and the tender angels lean toward Botticelli. The Christ child reaches for a pomegranate, its cluster of red seeds a long-standing symbol of the Passion to come. It hangs today in the Louvre in Paris.