Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
This small devotional panel shows the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child, with the young Saint John the Baptist standing beside them. The three figures are arranged in a shallow, almost frieze-like composition against a landscape of hills and a pale sky. The Virgin’s head is tilted and her eyes are lowered; the two children look at each other, and John holds a reed cross, the sign of his future role.
The painting is an early work, made around 1468-1470, when Botticelli was in his mid-twenties and still working in the delicate, linear manner of Fra Filippo Lippi, his teacher. The faces are soft and rounded, the drapery is drawn with fine, springing lines, and the colour is built on pale rose, blue and gold. The tempera technique - pigment bound in egg yolk - gives the surface a matte, almost chalky finish quite unlike oil painting.
The panel entered the Louvre in 1824 and is one of the museum’s key works of early Italian Renaissance painting. It shows Botticelli before the mythological subjects and the swirling line of his mature style, and it is a good example of the private devotional pictures that were produced in large numbers in fifteenth-century Florence.
Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445-1510) was born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi in Florence and trained with Fra Filippo Lippi. He worked for the Medici and produced the Primavera and The Birth of Venus, as well as a celebrated series of illustrations to Dante. His reputation collapsed after his death and was revived only in the nineteenth century by the Pre-Raphaelites.
Devotional panels of the Virgin and Child were the standard product of Florentine workshops in the fifteenth century, made for private chapels and domestic use. Botticelli’s early work belongs to the moment when Florentine painting was moving from the decorative linearity of Lippi toward the more monumental forms of the High Renaissance.
Denon Wing · Level 1 · Italian Paintings, 15th Century (Grande Galerie)
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
Other pieces from the same artist, period or type of object.
