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Artist or Maker: Workshop of Alessandro Filipepi, called Sandro Botticelli Florence 1444/5-1510

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Notes: This small painting is striking in its affinity to Botticelli's Madonna and Child with the young Saint John the Baptist in a landscape , formerly in the collection of Winthrop Paul Rockefeller (fig. 1; R. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, Life and Work , Berkeley, 1989, p. 223). Several points of comparison provide compelling evidence of a connection between master and student.

Lightbown calls attention to some unconventional aspects of Botticelli's painting, which are important as they are also relevant to the present work: the inclusion of references to antiquity and the prominence of the landscape within the picture. He comments ( loc. cit. ): 'This is one of the few direct quotations from the antique in Botticelli's work, its vigorous rendering of the densely moving forms of ancient relief shows that Botticelli was as sensitive as any of his contemporaries to the character and style of classical sculpture'. The landscape, he notes, 'is rendered as a bird's eye view from the loggia, it is bathed in light that is very characteristic of this moment in Botticelli's art, the heightened sensibility to the emotive and dramatic suggestiveness of light or darkness is without parallel in Botticelli's art, in contrast, is the mixture of green-leafed trees with yellowing autumnal trees'.

The painter of our Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist must have been aware of Botticelli's unusual composition and struck by these elements for he includes them here. The vantage point on this scene is similarly high, allowing for a greater exploration of the details in the landscape. The prominent placement of the baptismal font with its clearly delineated strigilation is an emphatic reference to antiquity; it is our artist's response to the relief on the parapet behind the figures in Botticelli's picture.

While sources for the figural types are abundant in Botticelli's work and may include the Madonna and Child (Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan) and Madonna and Child with the young Saint John (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence), the figure of Saint John reflects that in the ex-Rockefeller painting. Confined somewhat awkwardly into the lower left of the composition, this artist matches the figure here, making no attempt to correct.

The preponderance of technical evidence for this painting suggests that this painting was made during Botticelli's lifetime. On stylistic grounds Laurence B. Kanter, after first-hand examination of the work (February 2008), dates it more precisely to the mid-1480s. He reminds us that the Botticelli composition used for comparison here was not widely known, or indeed accepted as an autograph work until the mid-twentieth century, making late imitations of it improbable.