The Virgin and Child with an Angel is taking some clusters of grapes and an ear of wheat, the symbols of the sacrament of the altar. With the other hand she is holding the Bambino, who lifts his right arm in a sort of premature Eucharistic benediction.
The Virgin and Child with an Angel, known as the Virgin of the Innocenti, sitting and showing her right profile, and the Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist as a Child, kept at the Louvre, already look more sophisticated due to the sombre colour of the dress. The first has the uncertain, dreamy look of Lippi’s Madonna. Her headdress that covers almost all of her hair is taken from the popular fashion. The second has lowered her eyes and her head is covered with a light transparent veil, crowned by a halo of light. She piously presses the child against her chest, who is puffy, sickly, and whose anxious expression resembles the Jesus in Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair. The embrace of the Virgin of the Innocenti is less motherly. Assisted by the angel, whose blonde hair is braided like that of a little girl, she seems to be bouncing her son softly to amuse him or to rock him to sleep. The Virgin of the Louvre, in her dark blue cloak, is very grave, even melancholy. Does this meditating face betray a premonition of the tragic Mother of the Seven Sorrows, an anticipation of the Stabat Mater?
29. Adoration of the Child, c. 1470.
Pen with brown shading, white heightening and ink wash, 16 × 25.7 cm.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
30. Virgin and Child with an Angel, 1466–1467.
Tempera on panel, 87 × 60 cm.
Galleria dello Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence.
31. Sandro Botticelli (?), Virgin and Child with Angels, 1465–1470.
Oil and tempera on panel, 86.7 × 57.8 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
32. Sandro Botticelli (?), The Virgin and Child Supported by an Angel under a Garland, c. 1465.
Tempera on panel, 110 × 70 cm.
Musée Fesch, Ajaccio.
In 1902, the Archivio storico dell’Arte registered a Madonna by Botticelli, the Virgin and Child, known as the Madonna Guidi de Faenza, a work of his early youth that was put up for sale in Rome. Compared to a similar Madonna by Filippo Lippi, which is at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, this Virgin by Botticelli distinctly marks the moment when the pupil embraced a purer ideal and broke free from his master. In Lippi’s painting, Mary is but a young Florentine contadina girl, her hair covered by an almost monkish bonnet, like those worn by the common people. She looks into the distance indifferently while the child tenderly reaches out to her. To the right, there is a steep high cliff; a river crosses a landscape in the back. A high horizon frames the young woman’s head. In comparison, Botticelli’s virgin is almost blonde, almost childlike, her head covered by an aerial veil. She gazes upon her son with pious tenderness, and the child turns to her full of affection. The line of the horizon is lowered, and the head of the young mother stands out against radiating light. The Madonna’s tunic of bright ruby red, like the pale violet garment of the Bambino, heralds the feast of colours in which the painter will indulge. Mary’s fine, delicate hands and all the tiny details of the painting are already, as the critic of the Archivi put it, flowers of grace, “fiori di grazia”. This rare jewel reappeared at the gallery of the Baron of Schlichting in Paris, and has since been kept at the Louvre.
Among the young master’s paintings, the Madonnas convey a royal dignity. There is a touch of intimacy about the Bambino and the side figures, who have been granted the honour to go near the child. The child, animated by the scent of roses, plays with a pomegranate that his mother offers to him with her free hand, and he is carrying a piece of the red fruit to his mouth. The angel of the Innocenti painting is adorned by a traditional halo. The hair of the two angels and Saint John in the Santa Maria Nuova painting is falling over their necks in generous waves, arranged like a diadem or parted in the middle of the head. Botticelli’s angels also shed the white wings and the chaste floating robes they wore at the time of Fra’ Angelico, along with their iconic medieval gravity. They seduce us more and more with their patrician refinery, the richness of their garments and the velvety sweetness of their large eyes.
Looking at the Saint Sebastian, housed today in the museum of Berlin, we can make an observation that will help us understand the general intelligence of Botticelli’s works. He is a boy of twenty, tall, slender and willowy, with delicate legs, and somewhat scrawny arms that are tied behind his back. He is standing very upright, his face thoughtful without any apparent suffering. He does not try to move us with the spectacle of his martyrdom. The arrows stuck in his chest, his heart, his flanks, and his thighs, do not seem to bother him. A delicate and robust body, without any anatomical subtlety, presents its muscles and flesh in graphic firmness. The model doubtlessly came from a sculptor’s workshop; perhaps Pollaiolo or Verrocchio had referred him to their friend Botticelli.
What is striking about this figure is the slenderness of the ensemble; Botticelli sticks with Donatello’s canon. His master Lippi preferred huddled bodies, round, heavy heads, and strong hands. Botticelli elongates the human body and legs in order to achieve a momentum that sometimes gives majesty to the posture. The chiselled faces with the luminous gaze at their widest point are admirable. This notion of grace was not a novelty; you can find it beyond Donatello, for example in Cimabue, certain primitive painters, and better still, in sculptors of our Gothic age. They responded to the mysticism of their forefathers. The portrait of Saint Louis, crafted from life by the wonderful Franciscan Fra’ Salimbene, almost seems to be coming out of the portal of the cathedral. The inscription reads, “Erat autem Rex subtilis et gracilis, macilenlus convenienter et longus, habens vultum angelicum et faciem gratiosam.” – “The king was delicate and graceful, slender and tall, his angelic face was full of grace.”
But Botticelli did not need to scour some distant aesthetic tradition to find models for his figures. Being a Florentine and the pupil of a naturalist master, all he needed to do was to look around him at the people that Florence showed him every day. In Botticelli’s time, the Tuscan people – the craftsmen, the stonemasonry and mosaic apprentices, the young farmers, the sand diggers – still had the characteristic features of their ancient Etruscan forefathers: slender, elastic bodies, restless and nimble, the neck a little long, the face more expressive and flexible than regular by the standards of formal beauty. There is a word as only the Italian language could produce it, so tender to the ear and of infinite nuances. It expresses the sensation of art that impresses itself on anyone who lays eyes on this Florentine youth. The word is snellezza, the agile lightness of their nimble extremities; snellezza, the liveliness of the features, the cheerfulness of the faces.
33. The Virgin and Child with an Angel, early 1470s.
Tempera and oil on wood, 85.2 × 65 cm.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
34. The Virgin and Child and Two Angels, c. 1470.
Tempera on wood panel, 100 × 71 cm.
Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.
We should now study a small Botticelli painting (The Return of Judith to Bethulia), in which two very young girls, both slender as a reed, are
