성모의 대관식

This panel is a lunette, the half circle made to fit the curve above a door, so its shape was decided by a building rather than by the painter. Which building, nobody knows. Florentine chapels and sacristies of the 1470s were full of panels like it, and this one lost its address somewhere in the five centuries since. It is more than two metres wide and painted on poplar.

Filippino Lippi was very young when he made it. His father Filippo, a painter and a Carmelite friar, had died in 1469, and the son finished his training with Botticelli, whose cascading drapery and fanlike folds run right through this Coronation. The colour is already his own. Some scholars take it for the earliest surviving picture by him. Earlier writers gave the panel to Botticelli himself; Washington, which has had it since 1943, lists it under Filippino's name.