Botticelli wants to show us just two things about Our Blessed Lady: that she is beautiful, and she loves her Son. The two seem to be connected. He feels, and we with him, that her profound beauty is the outward expression of her spiritual grace. It is her love, seen here in a wholly unselfconscious absorbtion in prayer, that illuminates that pale and gentle face, those long expressive hands, the ineffable grace of her whole person.

In the whole picture, of which this is just a part, Mary holds Jesus on her knee, while angels lift up a book on which, one hand holding a pen, she is inscribing the Magnificat. Three angels cluster round the page, while two more hold over her shining head the heavenly crown with which her Son will crown her after her death. The small Jesus seems to stay her hand, looking up at her with a look of loving incomprehension.

We know the words of the Magnificat which Mary is repeating to herself: her lips are slightly parted. In this poetic prayer, she ‘magnifies’, attributes all the greatness of God, her Lord and Saviour. “For He has looked on His servant in her nothingness". It is that simple awareness of 'nothingness' that Botticelli celebrates. “Nothing?”, thinks her Son: “No, the purest and fairest of my Father’s children, ‘full of grace’.”

But Mary is indifferent to glory; she ignores the hovering crown, she does not see the admiration of the angels; she is lost in her overwhelming sense of the greatness of God. Even more than the extraordinary loveliness of her face, it is this humility that makes this painting, for many, Botticelli’s masterpiece. Humility is a technical term, really, for that self-forgetfulness natural to love. It is prayer’s essence. When we pray it is God that matters. All our attention is on Him. What we are, what we deserve, how we are to be judged, these things do not concern us: they are God’s concern. Ours is to let Him take possession of ourselves, to interpose no obstacle.

Mary here is a figure of the deepest stillness. We feel her intensity. All that she is concentrates on the reality of God. Her expression reveals no emotion. Prayer is not the time for that. It is time for intention, willed desire, choice. We know the words of the Magnificat and so can verbalise Mary’s desire. But she herself is unconscious of the words, focusing herself on the unexpressed meaning, her longing, her love. Lowliness of heart, which is what this painting makes visible, is the natural effect, the simple result of choosing God alone and sacrificing the pleasures of self interest. It is only God, God alone, “who does great things” to us all.