Madonna and Child Enthroned with Two Angels

This Madonna and Child Enthroned with Two Angels at the Metropolitan Museum dates from about 1440, placing it in the period when Lippi was transforming Florentine devotional painting. The attendant angels—a motif Lippi would make his own—frame the Virgin with a graceful symmetry that prefigures the enchanting angel figures in his later Uffizi tondo. His influence on the next generation of Florentine painting was decisive: his pupil Sandro Botticelli took Lippi's lyrical elegance and developed it into the mythological paintings that became the defining images of Medici humanist culture.

The angels' transparent veils and the Virgin's luminous complexion demonstrate Lippi's mastery of layered oil glazes, while the architectural throne provides a convincing spatial setting for the sacred group.