The Virgin and Child, called the Guidi di Faenza Madonna
Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445-1510) · c. 1465-1470
The Virgin holds the Child against her, and behind them a landscape opens out with buildings in it, a rare setting in Botticelli's early Madonnas, which usually place the figures against a wall or a niche. The panel is small, the size of a private devotional image. The Virgin's downcast eyes and long fingers, the Child's plump body and the soft fall of the veil show a young painter who has absorbed Filippo Lippi's sweetness and is beginning to draw with the wiry, elegant line that will become his own.
The museum dates it between fourteen fifty and fourteen seventy five, in the first years of Botticelli's activity. Its modern name comes from the Guidi museum in Faenza, a private collection sold in Rome in nineteen hundred and two, where the panel was bought by Baron Basile de Schlichting, a Paris collector who left his pictures to the Louvre in nineteen fourteen. At his death the picture was listed as attributed to Botticelli; today it is accepted as his. Look at the landscape through the opening behind the figures, a little world of hills and towers painted with a miniaturist's care.
Did You Know? The picture takes its name from the Guidi museum in Faenza, the private collection where it hung until it was sold in Rome in nineteen hundred and two.
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