二人の天使のいる聖母子

This is early Botticelli, painted around 1468, when he was in his early twenties and still absorbing everything his teachers could show him. You can see two of them in it. The tender, slightly wistful Virgin comes straight from his master, the monk-painter Filippo Lippi. The firmer modelling of the faces echoes Verrocchio, the sculptor and painter in whose busy Florentine workshop the young Leonardo was training at that very time. Mary holds the Christ child while two angels crowd close on the left. The panel has had a hard life, some of its paint flaking away, and for a while scholars doubted Botticelli's hand in it at all. Today it counts as one of his first surviving works, made years before the Venus and the Primavera that would make his name.