PORTLAND, OR.- Just in time for the holidays, the Portland Art Museum is presenting Sandro Botticelli’s masterwork Madonna of the Magnificat (ca. 1483), a tondo (round painting) of the Madonna and Child with angels. This rarely seen work is a variant of the artist’s celebrated painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, considered one of the finest Madonna and Child paintings of the Renaissance and a high point of Botticelli’s career.

Masterworks | Portland: Botticelli, the Portland Art Museum’s presentation of Madonna of the Magnificat, opened Wednesday, December 21, and will remain on view through May 14, 2023. The exhibition is the seventh installment of the Museum’s Masterworks | Portland series, which has brought to Portland individual works of outstanding quality by great artists such as Titian, El Greco, and Francis Bacon.

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was a leading artist of the Renaissance, a moment of tremendous creativity when artists and thinkers drew inspiration from the classical past and adopted a more humanistic approach. First apprenticed to a goldsmith, Botticelli later joined the workshop (bottega) of painter Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406–1469), who was praised by his contemporaries for his elegant compositions and skillful deployment of color. Over many years, Botticelli learned the methods of panel painting and fresco and absorbed Lippi’s refined style and proportions, attentiveness to fabrics, and one-point perspective. By 1470, Botticelli had his own independent practice and was gaining recognition for his work. He combined Lippi’s linear elegance with a more vigorous, sculptural form; a greater naturalism graces his art, always tempered by a search for ideal beauty.




“Sandro Botticelli is celebrated for his inventive, elegant compositions and depictions of ideal beauty,” said Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D., Curator of Prints and Drawings. “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.” 

Botticelli’s depiction of the Madonna and Child with angels is a masterpiece of both composition and symbolism. Echoing its tondo shape, Madonna of the Magnificat exhibits a series of harmonious curvilinear forms. The Madonna gracefully bends forward over Christ, embracing him with her arms and torso, while at the left, a standing angel dressed in rich carmine leans lovingly over two kneeling angels, enclosing them with his right arm. The dome of heaven, flecked with gold stars, ensconces the holy scene in a perfect circle. The rose motif of the Madonna’s throne, the fruit in her left hand, and the window behind her further the symphony of round shapes. Meanwhile, sharp-eyed visitors will delight in looking for the symbols that help tell the story, from the book upon the Madonna's lap to the pomegranate she holds, to the rosette motif on the chair.

Madonna of the Magnificat was formerly in the collection of the late Paul Allen, who acquired it in 1999. Other masterpieces from Allen’s collection were featured in Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection, which debuted at the Portland Art Museum in October 2015. This painting appears at the Museum on special loan from a private collector, presenting an extraordinary opportunity for the public to experience this superb artwork by an icon of the Italian Renaissance.

Masterworks | Portland: Botticelli will be just one of the outstanding exhibitions on view at the Portland Art Museum in the coming year. Major openings in 2023 include Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio (June – September 2023), the U.S. premiere of Hito Steyerl: This is the Future (February 11 – May 27, 2023), Black Artists of Oregon (August 2023 – February 2024), and Africa Fashion from the V&A, London. Learn more about 2023 exhibitions.