Virgin and Child With The Infant St. John The Baptist (Botticelli) - The Painting

The Painting

The MASP painting is unanimously dated in the last decade of the 15th century, based on similarities with other works from this period, in which one perceives a change in pictorial style of the author. We emphasize the beautiful structure of the composition, in which the figures of the Virgin and Child stand boldly inside the tondo, hereby freeing himself from the elegant symmetry of his youth. The same compositional clearance can be noted in the details of the angled seat, upon which rests the book Magnificat, supported on the frame of the painting in an almost illusionist fashion. It is equally noteworthy the remarkable intensification of the emotional bond that unites Mary and baby Jesus, unusual in Madonnas executed by the painter in his youth.

The Italian art historian Roberto Longhi notes that the drawing of the scene is structured through "cross and radial lines" and not by "arching flexible lines", which places the work in the aforementioned context of freer composition that marks the maturing style of the painter in the late 15th century. Antonino Santangelo emits a similar opinion, noting that the "free and harmonious intertwining of hands and faces, mobility and precision recall the works of Botticelli shortly before 1500".

In fact, it is possible to list at least a dozen productions by Boticelli, all of the last decade of the century, similar in composition to the work of MASP, the closest being the tondo that is conserved at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, identical to the title of this work and also dated around 1490.