Sandro Botticelli

I couldn't dig up much on this one — no name for her, nothing about why it was painted. If anyone knows, I'd take the story.

The long, low shape is the giveaway, apparently: pictures built this wide were often part of the furniture — a bench back, or the panel set above a bed — rather than something hung by itself. There are wasps up in one corner that some people read as a pun on a family's name.

It's painted on canvas rather than a wooden panel, which was still an odd choice at the time, and it seems to have been made for a Medici cousin's country house rather than a church. Who exactly ordered it, and what for, nobody seems to have settled.

Apparently this was painted after he was already dead — he was stabbed at Mass in 1478 as part of a plot against his family, and pictures like this got made afterward so people had something to remember him by.

The man who paid for this was, from what I've read, a broker who wanted everyone to know how close he stood to the Medici — so a good number of the faces crowding in are theirs, painted in as kings and hangers-on. It went up on a church wall, which is a very polite place to put an advert for yourself.

This one's part of a set — seven small panels showing scenes from the life of Christ, according to the Met, though nobody's fully sure which church they were first painted for.

Wikipedia says the Magi were basically local celebrities in Florence — there was a confraternity dedicated to them that restaged the wise men's journey through the city every five years. This one's thought to date from a stretch when the painter was actually in Rome, working on the Sistine Chapel at the same time, which is a strange thing to picture.

Legend has it Saint Jerome asked for one last communion right before he died in his cell — it's not actually in the Bible, from what I can tell, just a story that stuck around for centuries.