Мадонна с Младенцем и младенцем Иоанном Крестителем

Around 1490 Florence was falling under the spell of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar who preached against luxury and worldly art from the pulpit of San Marco. Botticelli, who a few years earlier had painted pagan goddesses for the Medici family, spent his last decades on grave devotional pictures like this round panel. The Virgin lowers her eyes over the Christ Child while the young John the Baptist, the future desert preacher, presses in from one side. That figure of John, and much of the landscape behind, were painted by assistants in Botticelli's busy workshop. Mary's own face, tender and withdrawn, is the master's hand, worked in tempera on wood the way Florentine painters had done for generations.