Madonna adorante il Bambino con san Giovanni Battista

In the 1470s a well-off Florentine household might commission a round painting like this, a tondo, to keep at home for private prayer. Botticelli made it around the time he was working for the Medici circle, showing the Virgin kneeling in adoration before her child on the ground, with the young John the Baptist beside them holding his thin reed cross. The circle was a hard shape to compose inside, and Botticelli fits the figures to its curve so the whole panel reads like a medallion. Both children wear haloes, marking John's own place in the story. It is painted in egg tempera on poplar, close to a metre across, the standard Florentine method before oil paint took over.