Madonna col Bambino e un angelo

Around 1465 Sandro Botticelli was still a young man in Filippo Lippi's workshop, and this small panel is one of the first things we can point to and say he painted. You can see the apprentice in it. The whole arrangement, the tender young Madonna and the angel handing the Child across to her, comes almost directly from Lippi, whose own version of the same scene Botticelli plainly had in front of him. What is his own is the clarity of the faces and the way the two figures hold each other's gaze. The angel is painted as an ordinary Florentine boy in white and red, his wings barely creeping into the frame, as if the sacred moment were happening in a real room rather than in heaven. It sits today in the Hospital of the Innocents, the Florentine foundling home that took in abandoned children from 1445 onward, which gives the image of a mother receiving her infant a particular weight in that building. Look at the Child's splayed foot, toes fanning back. Later doctors noticed Botticelli had caught the ordinary reflex of a real baby's foot, drawn from a live model rather than a formula.