Maria col Bambino e angeli cantori

This is a tondo, a painting made round rather than square, a shape Florence loved in the later 1400s and one that is genuinely hard to compose, since everything has to curve and answer the circle. Botticelli fills it around 1477 with the Virgin and Child ringed by eight angels holding lilies and singing her praises, a crown marking her as Queen of Heaven. The heads and gestures sweep around the border in a slow circular motion that pulls your eye with them. It is tempera on a poplar panel, more than four feet across. Centuries later it took the name it still carries from a collector, the Polish count Atanazy Raczynski, who bought it in 1824 and eventually left it to Berlin.