"Adoration in the Forest"

Mary dominates the picture frame and as usual is bedecked in ultramarine. Her expression and demeanour is one of awestruck devotion. Jesus lies amongst the grass and blooming flowers of the forest floor, gazing out at us and inspiring in the contemporary devotee a similar adoration to that of Mary. John the Baptist is identifiable by his animal skin hidden beneath his robe. He too looks out at us with his staff's ensign bearing the inscription "Ecce Agnus Dei" or "Behold the Lamb of God". God the Father, with his splayed arms and hands, releases the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove on its path to the infant. This path is marked by Lippi with golden lines that sweep laterally with exquisite skeins of gold that make these lines nebulous, and seem to make even more miraculous the immaculate conception. It is the doubling of this "path" - the lines stretching downward and the sideways obscuring of them - that simultaneously makes the biblical story comprehensible to the believer and makes it mysterious, a matter of faith. 

Only Jesus and John the Baptist break the illusionistic spell of the painting's world by looking to us. Jesus seems to invite faith while John's expression is troubled, seeming to the viewer to bear a foreboding of his own fate and the sacrifice of the Lamb.