Fra Filippo Lippi was a Carmelite monk who fell in love with a nun he'd been commissioned to paint.
He ran off with her.
Cosimo de' Medici had to negotiate his release from his monastic vows with the Pope, which the Pope granted — reportedly because Cosimo threatened to withdraw Florentine banking services from the papacy.
His Madonna shows it.
This is a real woman, painted from life, in an actual room with an actual window behind her opening onto an actual Tuscan landscape.
The angels are bored children.
One of them props his chin on his hand and looks directly at us, which no angel in a religious painting had done before.
The model for the Madonna is believed to have been Lucrezia Buti — the nun.
Lippi was Botticelli's teacher.
You can see where Botticelli got his sense of feminine grace, his love of flowing hair, his Madonnas who look as though they might be thinking about something else.
Fun fact: Lippi's son Filippino Lippi also became a painter. The nun's son painted Madonnas. Florence found this entirely unremarkable.
