Madonna and Child and the Young St John the Baptist

The Madonna and Child with the young Saint John the Baptist, painted around 1505 and now in the Galleria Palatina at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, belongs to Botticelli"s late period when his style had shifted dramatically from the graceful classicism of his prime. Following the crisis of Savonarola"s preaching and execution in the 1490s, Botticelli"s art became more intensely devotional and formally archaic, deliberately rejecting the naturalistic advances that younger Florentine painters were pursuing.

The late style shows Botticelli abandoning the spatial depth and atmospheric perspective of his earlier work in favor of a flattened, more iconic presentation. The Madonna"s face retains the distinctive elongated oval and melancholy expression of Botticelli"s female type, but with a severity absent from his earlier Madonnas. The palette is cooler than his prime work, with less of the golden warmth that characterized the Primavera period. The drawing remains exquisite, with Botticelli"s incomparable line quality evident even in his most devotionally austere mode.