Pala del Trebbio

This altarpiece comes from late in Botticelli's life, in the 1490s, and it was made for the Medici. The commission came from Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, of the family's younger branch, for their country villa at Trebbio in the hills north of Florence. That is the same branch that, years earlier, had owned Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus. By now the mood in Florence had changed. The friar Savonarola was preaching hard against worldly beauty, and the painter of those pagan goddesses had turned almost entirely to sober religious work like this, the Virgin and Child ringed by saints. Much of the actual painting was done by his workshop, the aging Botticelli by then running a busy shop while his lyrical early manner was already going out of fashion.