The Virgin and Child with Two Angels, called the Madonna of the Pomegranate
Filippino Lippi (1457-1504) · c. 1465-1475
The Virgin holds the Child while two angels attend them, and a pomegranate, the fruit that gives the panel its name, is offered to the infant. The composition is intimate and vertical, the figures filling the panel and the faces close together. The Virgin's downcast look, the fine hair of the angels and the transparent veils are painted with a delicacy that made the picture pass for a Botticelli throughout the nineteenth century.
The museum now regards it as the work of Filippino Lippi, painted in all likelihood as a replica of a lost original by Botticelli, in whose workshop the young Filippino trained; a weaker and probably later version of the same composition is in the museum of the Petit Palais at Avignon. The panel belonged to Lord Northwick at Cheltenham, was sold there in eighteen fifty nine, and passed to Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild in Paris, whose widow bequeathed it to the Louvre in eighteen ninety nine. Look at the pomegranate, whose red seeds under one skin were read as a symbol of the Church and of Christ's Passion.
Did You Know? The pomegranate in the picture, with its many seeds under one skin, stood for the Church and, split open and red, for the Passion of Christ.
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