La Madone à la grenade

Botticelli painted this round panel in Florence around 1487, at the height of his success, with the city still under the sway of the Medici. The Virgin sits ringed by six angels, and in her lap the Christ Child touches an open pomegranate. That fruit is the key to the picture. Its mass of red seeds packed in one skin was an old symbol of the Church gathering many believers into one, and its blood-red pulp pointed ahead to Christ's death. Both mother and child wear a faint, downcast sorrow, as if they already know what is coming. The tondo, this circular format, was a fashionable shape for well-off Florentine homes rather than churches. Botticelli fills it with the clear line and pale gold light that were his signature. It hangs today in the Uffizi in Florence.