幼子イエスと聖母

This is early Botticelli, painted around 1470, when he was in his mid-twenties and only lately out of the workshop of Filippo Lippi, the monk-painter who taught him. You can see the debt plainly, in the Virgin's long fingers, the sheer veil, the wistful tilt of her head, all things Lippi favoured. Florence then was Medici Florence, and a devotional panel this size was made for a household, to be prayed before in a bedroom or a small chapel rather than hung in a church. Botticelli had not yet painted the mythologies that made his name, the Spring and the Venus. What is already here is the particular melancholy he gave the young mother, looking past her child rather than at him.