The Barbadori Altarpiece

The Virgin and Child stand among crowding angels while two saints - Frediano in red, Augustine in dark robes - kneel in the foreground. The painting is among the first of the sacra conversazione, the 'sacred conversation,' in which the Virgin and saints share a single unified architecture rather than being walled off in the separate compartments of an old-fashioned polyptych. Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar (and a famously worldly one), absorbed Masaccio's solidity but softened it with sweetness and bustling human detail; his pupil Botticelli would inherit that grace. The angels press in like inquisitive children, bringing the heavenly court down to earth.