Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist

The Virgin bends her head to the Christ Child as the boy John the Baptist, in his rough camel-hair coat and holding a slender reed cross, presses close against them; a rose bush, Mary's flower, blooms at the left. This is late Botticelli, the early lightness gone tense and inward, the figures crowded and charged with feeling. By now the painter had fallen under the spell of Savonarola, the Dominican friar whose fiery sermons against worldly art convulsed Florence, and his religious pictures grew steadily more fervent. The linear grace remains, but bent now toward anguish rather than reverie.