Possibly executed not long after his ANNUNCIATION, and featuring some of the same faux-alpine topography, Leonardo's delightfully curious Virgin and Child with a Carnation of c. 1476–78 (fig. 27), now in Munich, reveals his inclination to move beyond studio conventions and to probe with a keener eye the workings of human anatomy and the properties of light. In the panoramic landscape, glimpsed through windows, Leonardo shows that he could achieve the atmospheric-perspective effects of the finest Flemish paintings, for which Lorenzo the Magnificent had a special enthusiasm; precious masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and other Northern masters graced his palace. With a general concern for Medici approval, Leonardo no doubt derived some of his imaginative landscape elements, as well as the background window motif, from such pictures. His rugged landscape would have had an inviting familiarity for a northern European viewer. To Leonardo's audience, however, the mountain ranges must have seemed a forbidding wilderness and, in the context of his painting, suggestive of a primordial, ancient world now in recession, with the advent of Christ. Also much intrigued by Flemish art around that time, but less interested in natural topography, Sandro Botticelli chose to introduce a more sanguine, northern European townscape into the background of his Shooting of Saint Sebastian of 1474, painted for the Florentine church of S. Maria Maggiore.