마니피카트의 성모

Botticelli came back to Florence in 1482 after about a year in Rome, where he had painted frescoes on the walls of the new Sistine Chapel for the pope. Round pictures, tondi, were then the fashionable shape for devotion at home in Florentine houses, and his workshop produced a good many of them through the 1480s.

This is one of the versions of the Magnificat Madonna, a tondo about 63 centimetres across, with the Virgin writing the opening words of the canticle, the child in her lap and angels crowded around them. Scholars read it as largely his own hand with some studio help, which was normal for him by that date. The much larger and more famous version of the same composition, well over a metre wide, is in the Uffizi.

This smaller one passed through private hands all through the 20th century and sold in New York in November 2022, out of the estate of the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, for about 48 million dollars.