Madonna and Child with Angels, c.1455 by Fra Filippo Lippi
Canvas Print - 5604-LFF

Her hands meet in prayer, but her eyes do the real work – lowered, tender, shadowed by something that might already be grief. Fra Filippo Lippi paints the Virgin as if she has just glimpsed the whole story ahead, and the softness in her mouth is the softness of someone bracing herself. This is the quiet heart of Madonna and Child with Angels, and it is why the picture, painted around 1455, has never quite let go of anyone who stands before it in the Uffizi.

Look at how close Lippi brings us. The figures crowd forward almost to the picture plane, framed by a pale pietra serena surround that behaves like a window ledge – you half expect to rest your elbows on it. Behind them, a whole world opens: jagged coastal cliffs, a distant town, water pushing inland, vegetation scratched in with a jeweller's patience. The effect resembles the shallow marble reliefs Desiderio da Settignano and Mino da Fiesole were carving in Florence at the same moment, though Lippi grants his figures a warmth that stone cannot manage.

The Christ Child, wrapped in linen and lifted by two angels, twists toward his mother with both arms outstretched. One angel – the one in front – turns and grins straight at us, a real child's grin, gap-toothed and conspiratorial. It is one of the most disarming faces in fifteenth-century painting. Perhaps Botticelli, then a young apprentice in the workshop, was watching over Lippi's shoulder as this smile appeared; you can feel its inheritance in his own angels a decade later.

Color stays deliberately quiet. Deep lapis blue for the Virgin's mantle, a warm cinnamon lining at her sleeve, pearl-white veils drifting over her forehead where tiny beads have been threaded into her hair like a Florentine bride's. Her coiffure is entirely of its moment – this is a noblewoman of the Medici city, not a distant Byzantine icon. The haloes have almost dissolved into thin scratched rings of light, refusing to interrupt the landscape behind.

Lippi's handling is astonishingly fine. The gauze of the veil is built up in translucent glazes so thin you can read the shape of the skull beneath; the child's curls catch the light in tiny raised strokes. There is a faint scent, one imagines, of sea air coming through that opening – cool, mineral, mixed with the warmth of skin.

Whether the Virgin's features truly belong to Lucrezia Buti, the young nun Lippi loved and eventually married, remains a story without proof. It hardly matters. What Fra Filippo Lippi achieved here is a sacred image made entirely of human tenderness, and the Florentine Renaissance would spend the next fifty years catching up with it.