Sandro Botticelli in his later life had been one of the followers of the deeply moralistic friar Savonarola, though the full extent of Savonarola's influence remains uncertain.
In his gloomy The Mystical Nativity, painted around 1500 of 1501, Botticelli builds up the image using oil on canvas.
It is his only signed work, and has an unusual iconography for a Nativity.
The Greek inscription at the top translates as: "This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three-and-a-half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture".
Botticelli believes himself to be living during the Tribulation, possibly due to the upheavals in Europe at the time, and is predicting Christ's Millennium as stated in Biblical text.
It has been suggested that the painting may be connected with the influence of Savonarola, whose influence appears in a number of late paintings by Botticelli, though the contents of the image may have been specified by the person commissioning it.
The painting uses the medieval convention of showing the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus larger both than other figures, and their surroundings; this is certainly done deliberately for effect, as earlier Botticellis use correct graphical perspective.
He produces in 1501 another brooding painting, his “Pietá".
With Leonardo da Vinci‘s return to Florence the previous year, Florentine painting begins to move rapidly in new directions, further eclipsing Botticelli.
The authorities of the Cathedral of Florence in 1501 commission Michelangelo to create a monumental marble statue of David.
Michelangelo must work, however, with a marble block that had been damaged during the 1460s.
