Madonna del roseto

This is one of the first things Botticelli ever painted, made around 1469 when he was in his early twenties and still working in the shadow of his teacher, the friar Filippo Lippi. You can feel Lippi in the tenderness, but the Virgin is already more elongated and freely posed than anything the older man did, and the sturdy, large-headed Christ Child echoes the sculptor Verrocchio, in whose Florentine workshop the young Botticelli may also have spent time. Recent X-rays taken during cleaning at the Uffizi found his first underdrawing beneath the paint, the linear planning he then adjusted as he went. The roses behind the Virgin give the picture its name, laid down in the older technique of tempera rather than the oil he would later prefer.