by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 2, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Mary Enthroned with the Child and the Two Johns
Mary sits with the infant Christ between two standing men. At left, John the Baptist holds a slender cross; at right, John the Evangelist carries a book. Plants rise behind all three figures so densely that the greenery takes the place of a stone chamber. A small painted Crucifixion appears at the very bottom. This is the large altarpiece Botticelli made for the Bardi family chapel in Florence, now in Berlin. Its figures are easy to recognise from a distance, while its writing and tiny foreground image invite a closer look.[1]
The Gemäldegalerie titles the panel Mary Enthroned with the Child and the Two Johns, often called the Bardi Altar. It dates it to 1484–85 and records Giovanni d'Agnolo de' Bardi as the patron. The title matters because “Virgin and Child Enthroned” alone could describe many Renaissance paintings. Here the two Johns, the plant-filled setting and the named chapel give this one a specific identity.[1]
At a glance
- ArtistSandro Botticelli
- TitleMary Enthroned with the Child and the Two Johns (Bardi Altar)
- Date1484–85
- Supportpoplar panel; the current Berlin technical field does not specify a paint medium
- Dimensions185 × 180 cm, image size
- Original settingBardi funerary chapel, church of Santo Spirito, Florence
- Current collectionGemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
- Inventory number106
- Berlin acquisitionpurchased in Florence from Carl Friedrich von Rumohr in 1829
Where this work sits in Botticelli’s career
Fortitude
1470Primavera
c. 1480The Birth of Venus
c. 1485The Bardi Altar
1484–85The Mystical Nativity
c. 1500Contents
- Mary and the Two Johns
- The Bardi Chapel
- A Garden in Place of Stone
- The Small Crucifixion Below
- Reading the Panel Without Overclaiming
These object facts come from Berlin's current record. Its longer essay by curator Neville Rowley supplies the chapel context and several interpretations of the imagery. They are useful, but the visible painting and the documented collection facts should be kept distinct from proposed meanings of small details.[1]
Mary and the Two Johns
The composition is nearly square. Mary sits at the centre on a richly decorated throne, with the child across her lap. John the Baptist stands to the left in an animal-skin garment and red mantle. His thin cross and spare appearance separate him from the Evangelist at the right, whose grey beard, book and red-and-blue robes give him a different weight. The Berlin essay identifies an eagle behind the Evangelist, his familiar attribute.[1]
Both men turn towards the central pair, but neither simply repeats the other's pose. The Baptist extends an arm towards Mary and Christ. The Evangelist holds his book close and gestures with his free hand. Their different actions open a space around the child. Mary looks down rather than out at the viewer, while Christ twists across her lap and raises an arm towards her. The movement of his body makes this solemn, balanced arrangement feel active.[1]
The shared name John has a connection to the patron. Berlin's essay observes that Giovanni de' Bardi bore the Italian form of the name, so the pairing of Baptist and Evangelist is unlikely to be accidental. That relationship makes the saints more specific to the Bardi commission without requiring us to claim that their expressions are portraits of family members.[1]
The Bardi Chapel
The panel was made for a funerary chapel associated with the Florentine merchant Giovanni d'Agnolo de' Bardi in Santo Spirito. Berlin describes his return to Florence after business in London and places the chapel in the church's choir area. In that setting, the painting was an altar image seen in prayer and liturgy, not an isolated gallery picture. Its large figures could address worshippers across the chapel; the smaller writing would reward someone standing closer.[1]
The Berlin essay relates the chapel's architectural work to Giuliano da Sangallo and says his carved frame for the painting is lost. That loss limits what can be reconstructed about the original presentation. The decorative throne and painted plant setting survive within the panel, but they are not the same thing as the missing exterior frame.[1]
An account book gives this commission an unusually clear financial shape. In 1908, Herbert Horne published transcriptions from Giovanni de' Bardi's private ledger: a 7 February 1485 entry pays Giuliano da Sangallo for carving the altarpiece's frame, and a 3 August 1485 entry pays Botticelli 75 gold florins. The latter sum is divided in the record into two for ultramarine, 38 for gold and associated gilding or preparation, and 35 for the painter's work. The accounting shows that costly materials and the painted labour were separately valued. It does not let us assign every florin of the 38 to a visible patch of gold on the surviving panel, especially when the original frame has disappeared. Horne's view that most of the painting was executed between the two entries is an inference from payment dates, not a daily record of Botticelli at work.[5]
Botticelli put Mary and the two saints into one continuous space. Berlin's essay places that format within the Florentine development of the sacra conversazione, a “holy conversation” that brings sacred figures together in a unified picture. The panel keeps the central dignity of an altarpiece while allowing the saints to stand close enough to Mary and Christ for their gestures to relate.[1]
The museum records that Berlin bought the work in 1829 from Carl Friedrich von Rumohr in Florence. That acquisition is a firm later point in the object's history. It does not mean every transfer between the Bardi chapel and the nineteenth-century purchase is fully documented by the short online record.[1]
Horne reports an intermediate route from older Florentine commentators: by 1677 the panel had been replaced at the Bardi altar by a work of Jacopo Vignali, and the Botticelli painting was said to have gone to the chapel patrons' house. It was sold to the Florentine dealer Fedele Acciai in 1825, before Rumohr obtained it for Berlin in 1829. The 1825 sale is a more precise step than the current museum's short acquisition field, but the reported stay in the patrons' house rests on later commentary rather than a continuous set of household inventories. Its frame and any associated lower paintings were already lost when Horne wrote.[5]
A Garden in Place of Stone
Behind the figures, foliage forms three deep, dark recesses. Lilies rise above Mary, while different trees and shrubs fill the spaces behind the Johns. The leaves and branches make a setting without enclosing the figures in masonry. Berlin's essay stresses this unusual choice: plant growth takes the place of the stone niches common in comparable altarpieces.[1]
The garden is not only decoration. Rowley reads the lilies and enclosed greenery in relation to Mary's purity and the hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden of Marian imagery. This is an interpretation of a familiar devotional language, not a botanical inventory in which every leaf has one fixed meaning. The flowers also have a visual task: their light forms crown the upper part of the throne and relieve the dense darkness behind it.[1]
A National Gallery paint-media study gives the garden a material dimension. Catherine Higgitt and Raymond White report walnut oil in the Berlin Bardi Altarpiece and identify verdigris in its green passages. Across the Botticelli works they examined, verdigris tended to occur with oil, while sampled malachite greens occurred with egg tempera. That is a finding about analysed paint, not a method for assigning every visible leaf to a specific pigment from a photograph. It also shows why Berlin's short catalogue description of the support as poplar should not be silently expanded into an assumed “tempera on panel” medium. Botticelli could make a dark plant setting through a deliberate choice of binder and pigment as well as through drawing and iconography.[4]
Vases, fruit and flowers run along the horizontal ledge behind the figures. Scrolls carry writing near the plants. Berlin's essay says most of the passages derive from Ecclesiastes, known in this context for comparisons involving trees; Bildindex separately transcribes several of the visible scrolls. Their words connect the painted garden to texts used in devotion, though they would have been difficult for many viewers to read from across a chapel.[1][2]
An early account gives a different sort of evidence for the painting's reception. Vasari praised Botticelli's care in representing olive and palm trees in the Bardi Chapel work. That historical notice is valuable because it shows how its plants caught attention long before the panel entered Berlin. It does not by itself settle every species or every symbolic reading proposed later.[3]
The Small Crucifixion Below
At the lower centre, in front of the throne, a little blue-ground Crucifixion appears inside a dark rectangular form. Its scale is startling beside the large figures. The eye can move from Christ as a child in Mary's lap down to Christ on the cross, connecting infancy and sacrifice within one image.[1]
Rowley notes a curious effect. A vessel behind the small Crucifixion appears to cast a shadow on the ledge, but the Crucifixion form does not behave like a normal object in the same painted space. He compares it to a tabernacle door and relates that possibility to the panel's altar setting and the Eucharist. The painting suggests such a function visually; the online record does not present an extant working door that can be opened today.[1]
The detail also changes the pace of looking. From a distance, Mary and the two Johns control the picture. Up close, the small cross, the plant inscriptions and the carved-looking throne reveal a denser network of references. Botticelli makes a large public altarpiece that can also sustain attentive individual viewing.[1][2]
Reading the Panel Without Overclaiming
Not every intriguing detail has a secure identification. Berlin's essay notices a small laurel-crowned male profile on the left side of the throne base but leaves open whether it echoes an ancient medal or represents a particular Florentine humanist. The possibility of Lorenzo de' Medici is raised there as a question, not established as the answer.[1]
The Bardi work itself provides enough to examine without a speculative later story. Its named chapel and patron place the image in a particular setting. The two saints, a richly constructed garden and a little Crucifixion draw the eye towards the altar's devotional purpose. Where the documents and the painting leave a question open, as with the tiny male profile, the question can remain open.[1]
Return to the centre after following the plants and scrolls around the picture. Mary's lowered gaze meets the child's upward movement, while the Johns stand at either side. The panel's scale makes the group commanding; its small details keep that command from becoming simple. In the Bardi chapel, the image joined family memory and worship. In Berlin, it still asks the viewer to move between the whole arrangement and its smallest signs.[1]
Botticelli and related artworks
Discussion
Look again at the details and evidence discussed above. Which part of the painting changes most when you know its history?
These prompts invite close looking and source-led questions rather than a single settled interpretation.
Reader Insights
How do the two Johns direct your attention towards Mary and Christ?
What changes when you look from the large figures to the small Crucifixion at the base?
How might the plant-filled setting have worked in the original chapel?
Join the Conversation
Share an observation or question about the painting below.
References
- Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, “Thronende Maria mit dem Kind und den beiden Johannes,” inv. 106, current object record and Neville Rowley's 2019 catalogue essay, updated 30 July 2026, accessed 29 September 2026 View source.
- Bildindex der Kunst & Architektur, “Madonna Bardi,” object record and inscription transcription, accessed 29 September 2026 View source.
- Giorgio Vasari, Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, English edition, account of Botticelli's Bardi Chapel painting, accessed 29 September 2026 View source.
- Catherine Higgitt and Raymond White, “Analyses of Paint Media: New Studies of Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 26 (2005), p. 91 and notes 34–35, Berlin Bardi samples and wider Botticelli green-pigment comparison; consulted 1 October 2026 View source.
- Herbert P. Horne, Alessandro Filipepi, Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence (London, 1908), printed pp. 135–37, quoting Giovanni de' Bardi's account-book entries for the Sangallo frame and Botticelli's 1485 payment, then reviewing the later chapel-to-Berlin route; digitised original consulted 1 October 2026. Horne's proposed sequence of execution and the reported household stay are distinguished from the transcribed payments View source.
- Image credit. Sandro Botticelli, Mary Enthroned with the Child and the Two Johns (Bardi Altar), 1484–85. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. 106. Photo: Jörg P. Anders. Public Domain Mark 1.0 View source · View source.
