朝拜圣婴

Filippino Lippi was the son of a scandal. His father, the friar-painter Fra Filippo Lippi, had run off with a young nun, Lucrezia Buti, who became Filippino's mother. Losing his father while still a boy, he trained beside Botticelli, and by the early 1480s, when he painted this small panel in Florence of the Virgin kneeling in adoration of her newborn, his work was almost indistinguishable from that master's. The soft faces and the clear, cool light stay so close to Botticelli that for years pictures like this were catalogued under a made-up name, the friend of Sandro, until scholars realised that the friend was really the young Lippi himself.