聖母子

Botticelli was barely into his twenties when he painted this, still working in the shadow of his teacher Filippo Lippi, the Florentine friar-painter who taught him how to draw a face. You can see Lippi in the Madonna's soft, downturned features and the thin gold lines of her halo. This is a good 15 years before the mythologies that made his name, the Venus and the Primavera, and it belongs to the ordinary business of a Florentine workshop, which turned out devotional panels like this one for private homes. The child reaches for his mother with the plump, unsteady weight of a real infant. The panel hangs today in Avignon, in a museum built largely from a 19th-century collection of early Italian pictures gathered by a marquis named Campana.