La Vierge et l'Enfant entre le petit saint Jean Baptiste et un ange

La Vierge et l'Enfant entre le petit saint Jean Baptiste et un ange by Jacopo da Sellaio, now at the Musée du Petit Palais in Avignon, belongs to the type of intimate devotional tondo or small panel that Florentine workshops produced in large quantities for domestic chapel and bedroom use in the later fifteenth century. Sellaio, a follower of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi who worked in Florence in the 1470s-90s, specialised in tender, intimately scaled religious subjects. The inclusion of the infant John the Baptist beside the Christ Child was a Florentine specialty tied to the city's particular devotion to its patron saint, making this a distinctively local devotional formula.

Sellaio achieves the characteristic Botticellesque quality of tender, slightly melancholic grace through careful figure spacing and the way the infant figures orient toward and away from each other, creating relational dynamics rather than static grouping. The angel provides compositional balance and introduces a secondary register of celestial witness into the domestic devotional scene.