Virgin and Child with an Angel (Our Lady of the Eucharist)

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Virgin and Child with an Angel (Our Lady of the Eucharist): Sandro Botticelli

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Sandro Botticelli Various Paintings - Virgin and Child with an Angel (Our Lady of the Eucharist)

Keywords: Virgin, Child, Angel, Our, Lady, Eucharist

Work Overview: Our Lady of the Eucharist (Virgin and Child with an Angel; Madonna and Child with an Angel)
Sandro Botticelli
Alternative name: Virgin and Child with an Angel (Botticelli)
Date: 1470
Style: Early Renaissance
Genre: religious painting
Media: wood, tempera
Dimensions: 84 x 65 cm
Location: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Fenway Court), Boston, MA, US

Virgin and Child with an Angel also known as Our Lady of the Eucharist (Italian: Madonna dell'Eucarestia) is a tempera on wood panel painting by Sandro Botticelli made c.1470. It is now held by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, acquired from Prince Chigi in 1899. The painting measures 85.2 × 65 centimetres (33.5 × 25.6 in) and one of a series of Madonna paintings by Botticelli from 1465 and 1470. It shows influences from Filippo Lippi's Virgin and Child and Angels of c.1465 held by the Uffizi.

The Virgin Mary is shown in a three quarter view, with the Baby Jesus held on her lap. A smiling angel, wearing a crown of myrtle, offers them a bowl containing twelve ears of wheat and grapes. The child raises a hand in benediction, and Mary holds one of the ears of corn.

The scene may be set in a walled garden or hortus conclusus, symbolic of Mary's virginity, with a landscape of hills and a river visible through an opening in the arcade around the wall. The wheat and grapes are symbolic of the bread and wine of the Eucharist, which themselves symbolise the body and blood of the incarnate Jesus, and the number of ears possibly refer to the number of the apostles at the Last Supper.

Prince Chigi first offered the painting to Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1899 for $30,000. She demurred initially, but by the time she decided to buy the price was $70,000. The sale was controversial in Italy, where there was press comment that the sale was illegal, and Prince Chigi was fined. The painting was exhibited at Colnaghi in London before being transported to Boston.

This painting shows the synthesis of trends that formed the style of Botticelli's painting. The composition of the painting resembles Lippi's art, but the figures are more delicately blended into the painting and their expressions and poses are more complicated.

Behind the monumental, very sculptural figures is a broad, hilly landscape with a river. The boy-like angel appears to have just this moment stepped through the gap in the wall and come up to Mary and the child; he is presenting them with a bowl decorated with ears of grain and full of grapes. The Christ Child is blessing the gifts, which symbolize the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

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A vast number of paintings of the Virgin and Child were produced in Florence in the late 1400s to meet a new demand for devotional images on a domestic scale. Early in his career, Botticelli specialized in such works. While this painting possesses much of the calm prettiness expected from these Madonnas, it also contains unexpected elements of allegory. The angel, Virgin, and Christ Child all look down at a bowl of grapes studded with ears of grain. Grapes and wheat produce the wine and bread of the Eucharist, and allude to the blood and body of Christ’s sacrifice. The Virgin carefully selects some of the wheat, to signify that she accepts her child’s fate. The angled arcade adds further mystery: like a set of isolated doorways, the structure encloses the figures while it simultaneously frames the landscape beyond.

In 1899, Isabella Stewart Gardner discovered that the Prince Chigi in Rome was willing to sell his painting by Botticelli, so she cabled Bernard Berenson to ask if it was worth $30,000. He replied emphatically that it was not, but she was not discouraged. A few months later, the price had risen to $70,000 and Berenson was recommending its purchase! The acquisition stirred great controversy because the press believed that the painting had been illegally exported from Italy; the Prince Chigi was fined, but later cleared of impropriety. Popular interest on both sides of the Atlantic became so great that it was decided to exhibit the painting in London at Colnaghi before it was shipped to Boston.

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