The painting by Sandro Botticelli featured on the cover was probably painted in Florence in the mid- to late-1480s, but the earliest record of it we have dates only from February 1846, when it was bought in Paris by the Bond Street dealers J.M. and M. Smith at the posthumous sale of Baron Dominique-Vivant Brunet-Denon, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte's chief adviser in artistic matters. Within a month, the Smiths had sold the picture to John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick, who was amassing a pioneering collection of Italian paintings at Thirlestane House, his country residence near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. It was one of the first paintings by Botticelli to enter a British collection. When Lord Northwick's pictures were put up for auction after his death in 1859, Francis Charteris, Lord Elcho (later 10th Earl of Wemyss), who was an influential if outspoken figure in the political and cultural affairs of the day, urged the Director of the National Gallery in London, Sir Charles Eastlake, to buy the Botticelli for the nation. Eastlake declined, judging the roses to be badly painted. ‘It so happens that they are most excellent representations of the briar-rose’, Elcho later proclaimed in his memoirs, and, undeterred, he bought the picture for himself and treasured it as the jewel of his collection: ‘I can truly say that there is not in the whole of the Florentine collections any one picture for which I would exchange this picture of mine’. When, on a visit to Gosford (the Wemyss seat in East Lothian) in 1892, the art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson foolishly voiced doubts about the authenticity of the Botticelli and other pictures, the furious earl summarily ejected him from the house in the middle of a thunderstorm. But relegated to the status of a workshop replica by Berenson and other writers, and hung high at Gosford and partially obscured by a thick layer of yellowed varnish, the painting was rather overlooked for most of the last century, and is not mentioned at all in the standard catalogue of Botticelli's works. Only in the early 1990s was it spotted by a visiting London picture dealer, subjected to closer inspection and technical analysis, and its authenticity reaffirmed. Its sale to an American museum was averted only by a last-minute fund-raising campaign, which happily secured its acquisition for the National Gallery of Scotland in November 1999.
The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child was probably painted as an aid to private devotion. It is a more complex image than it might seem at first glance, and our ignorance of the patron and its original setting makes it unwise to be too categorical about various aspects of its intended meaning. Its compositional simplicity, bold palette, elegant, gently swaying forms and great precision of contour are characteristic features of Botticelli's later works. The basic design, with the Virgin in three-quarters view kneeling in adoration of the infant Christ, is derived from a compositional type invented by Botticelli's teacher Filippo Lippi. The beautiful bower of thornless roses and the flower-filled meadow form an ‘enclosed garden’ (hortus conclusus), a symbol of the Virgin derived from imagery in the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament. This fertile oasis is contrasted with the barren, geometric rocky outcrop behind. The rose bower is extended to form a sort of floral mattress beneath the Virgin's mantle on which the infant Jesus lies. The naturalistically painted plants that punctuate the foreground, among them a strawberry, a violet and possibly a cranesbill at the left, may have carried some symbolic meaning (for example, being red, strawberries in art sometimes allude to the blood of the Passion), although it may be noted that similar plants appear in secular pictures by Botticelli. Unusually for this period, and uniquely among Botticelli's many Madonna compositions, the artist shows the infant Christ asleep, a detail which may also derive from the mystical imagery of the Song of Solomon, but, through the traditional association of sleep and death, could equally well be a premontition of his future self-sacrifice on the cross.
This picture is unusual from a technical point of view, too, in that it was painted on canvas, a support then only just coming into vogue in Italy and seldom employed by Botticelli. Canvas was lighter and cheaper than wood, but it seems to have been purely aesthetic considerations—the harmonious way in which the lean, egg-tempera paint interacts with the fine texture of the fabric—that dictated Botticelli's choice of this support, for there is evidence that his canvases, including this one, were originally attached to wooden boards. The selection of this relatively ‘informal’ support, combined with the lyrical, contemplative mood of the painting, may indicate that it was intended for a domestic setting in a palace or villa—in a study, bedroom or private oratory, perhaps—rather than for an altar in a church.
The creator of such celebrated works as the Primavera and the Birth of Venus (both in the Uffizi, Florence), Botticelli enjoyed considerable success during his lifetime and ran a sizeable studio, but his mature style was ultimately too personal and idiosyncratic to exert a lasting influence on Italian painting. With the advent of the High Renaissance of Raphael and Michelangelo, Botticelli's art was soon forgotten, and remained so until its rediscovery over the course of the nineteenth century.