Рождество Христово

In Florence in the early 1480s there was a booming market for one particular thing: round paintings of the Virgin and Child, made to hang in the home rather than a church. They were called tondi, and Botticelli, fresh from painting the Primavera for the Medici circle, was among the artists who turned them out. This is one of his. Mary kneels in her red dress and blue robe while Joseph, grey-haired, bends to lay the newborn on the ground in the folds of his cloak. The circular frame draws the figures gently inward, the way a small domestic altar would gather a family's attention. Isabella Stewart Gardner brought the panel to Boston in the 1890s, and it has kept its place in her house ever since.