Madonna Bardi

Botticelli painted this altarpiece for the Bardi family chapel in the church of Santo Spirito in Florence, where the banker Giovanni de' Bardi paid him seventy-five florins for it in the summer of 1485. The two saints flanking the enthroned Virgin are both named John, the Baptist on one side and the Evangelist on the other, a nod to the patron's devotions. What sets the picture apart is the garden. Botticelli filled the niche behind the throne with real plants, lilies, roses, ivy, cypress, palm, each carrying a meaning a Renaissance worshipper would have read as a symbol of Mary. The panel later left Italy and hangs today in Berlin, still square and dense with foliage the way a chapel viewer would first have met it.