Here’s another painting of Fioretta Gorini and her son Giulio portrayed in the role of the Madonna and the Infant Christ, one of many similar paintings by Sandro Botticelli and his workshop. Not surprisingly it embeds features which point to Leonardo da Vinci, and not just because he painted the same woman in two of his paintings – the Benois Madonna, and later the portrait mistakingly titled Ginevra de’ Benci.

In his monograph, Botticelli Life and Works, Ronald Lightbown describes the adoration scene:

The composition of the small tondo of the Virgin Adoring the Child, painted around 1490, was repeated, as it deserved to be, in many workshop versions. The broken gray masonry of the stable in the foreground, converts the circle into a square within which the Virgin, wearing a pink robe beneath the deep blue of her cloak, kneels in the dark sward, adoring the Child who lies on the cloak’s end propped up by a bale of straw, stretching up his hands to her. The straw is painted with great attention: each outer straw is executed with a straight stroke, highlighted with touches of yellow. From the triangle of sky to the left of the thatched golden-brown roof, a gold star sends down its ray above the Child’s head. Behind, a duck swims on a pool; beyond are low dark-green undulations with a wooden gateway opening onto a path over bright green hills on the left. On the right is a brown fence and a river landscape. Such browns – pale tawny brown, golden brown, chestnut – are characteristic of Botticelli’s later pictures; so too is the conjunction of tawny and light green to give a delightful effect of pastoral gladness.

Ronald Lightbown, Botticelli: Life and Work, pp 217-218

The painting is housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the gallery’s date attribution is between 1480 and 1490. However, there are indications in the work that suggest it was produced after 1490, possibly as late as 1495. The painting may appear to be a simple portrayal of the Virgin and Child, but with Botticelli nothing is as straightforward as it appears at surface level. There is an underlying narrative that relates to the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonrola, a revolutionary figure in Florence between his arrival in the city in1490 and the time of his execution in May 1498.

My assessment for the date of the painting is not before the second half of 1498, and after the execution of Girolama Savonarola.

The Virgin Adoring the Child also inspired Mantegna’s Parnassus, said to have been painted in 1497, although some of its iconography does suggest a later date. Mantegna produced a second painting for Isabella d’Este’s studiolo, the Triumph of Virtues. This is dated between 1500 and 1502.

• More details on this in a future post