海之圣母

This Madonna picked up its nickname, the Virgin of the Sea, from the thin band of water visible behind her. It was painted in Botticelli's Florence in the late 1470s, when his workshop was one of the busiest in the city and a teenaged Filippino Lippi was training in it. That closeness is why scholars still argue over the panel, some giving it to Botticelli himself and others to the gifted pupil learning to paint just like him. Either way it carries the workshop's manner, the long-necked, faintly melancholy Virgin, the child reaching up, the pale clear light. Behind them the little stretch of sea sits calm under a wide sky.