Virgin and Child with an Angel

In this tender devotional panel Sandro Botticelli shows the Virgin Mary pressing her cheek to the infant Christ, who reaches up to grasp the nape of her neck while a smaller angel looks on in adoration. Painted between 1475 and 1485, at the moment when the artist was forming the lyrical, linear style of his great mythologies, the picture carries the same ideal beauty and quiet melancholy into the intimate world of mother and child. The soft modelling of the faces, the clasp of the hands and the close enclosure of the group make the panel one of the artist’s most affecting treatments of a subject to which he returned throughout his career; the warm, bare panel left visible around the figures shows how the early Renaissance devotional picture was conceived as a window onto a sacred intimacy. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.