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In the spirit of the holiday season, the Portland Art Museum is presenting Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat. Created in 1483, the beloved (but rarely seen) work is a tondo, or “round painting.”
“Sandro Botticelli is celebrated for his inventive, elegant compositions and depictions of ideal beauty,” stated Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D., curator of prints and drawings, in a press release. “Botticelli and his workshop excelled particularly in exploring the possibilities of the round tondo format, perhaps nowhere so beautifully as in the Madonna of the Magnificat.”
Madonna of the Magnificat is a variant of the artist’s painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, one of the most revered Madonna and Child paintings of the Renaissance. Botticelli, who initially apprenticed to a goldsmith, is considered to be one of the finest artists of the period.
The exhibition opens Wednesday, Dec. 21, and runs through May 14, 2023. This is the seventh of the museum’s Masterworks | Portland series, which has also spotlighted Francis Bacon, El Greco and Titian.
Interestingly, Madonna of the Magnificat was formerly owned by the late Paul Allen, who acquired the painting in 1999. Other paintings from his art collection (which topped $1.5 billion at Christie’s last month, the biggest sale in auction history) were featured in a 2015 museum exhibition.