Madonna with Child, Saint John the Baptist and an Angel
Sandro Botticelli and workshop (About 1445 to 1510) · About 1490
The Virgin Mary bends her head toward the infant Christ, who reaches up to her, while the young Saint John the Baptist in his camel skin and an angel with a serious face press close on either side. Mary's long pale fingers, her heavy lidded eyes and the fine gold threads of her hair are unmistakably Botticelli, and so is the melancholy that hangs over the group, as if all four already knew the story's ending. The picture was painted in Florence around 1490, when Botticelli's workshop was producing devotional Madonnas for the palaces of the city's merchants.
Look at the transparent veil over Mary's head, painted with a few strokes of white over the gold, and at the flowers and the landscape glimpsed behind the figures. The drawing of the faces is Botticelli's own; the rest of the panel was probably finished by assistants, which was the normal way of working in a busy Renaissance studio, and scholars debate how much of it the master painted with his own hand. Compare the tenderness of Mary's gesture with the stiffness of the angel, and you can see two levels of skill in one picture. The composition, with figures packed into a shallow space, was designed to be seen up close in a private chapel.
The painting came to the museum from a Polish aristocratic collection, and it is the only Botticelli in Poland. It survived the Second World War, when the Germans systematically removed the museum's best works, and was recovered afterwards. It hangs in the gallery of European old masters on the ground floor alongside the Cranach and the Dutch and Flemish pictures, and it is the jewel of that gallery.
Did You Know? Botticelli's Madonnas were so popular in Florence that his workshop produced dozens, and his assistants sometimes reused his drawings of the same faces.
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