La Vierge et l'Enfant avec la couronne d'épines et les trois clous

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.