Ask the Scholar

Images of the Madonna and Child were common in the homes of Renaissance Italy, where they were focus of daily prayer and devotion and served as moral exemplars for young mothers and children. In this example, Christ and Mary’s divinity is downplayed; their halos are just barely visible and they appear quite simply as mother and son, sharing an intimate and almost playful exchange as the Christ Child holds onto his mother’s hand and reaches for her face. The Madonna has propped the child up on a stone table (perhaps intended to recall an altar) and before an expansive landscape of rocky cliffs, rolling hills, and a distant castle. The terrain is not too different from what the artist, Bartolomeo Montagna, would have seen around his native Vicenza, just east of Venice. Montagna was Vicenza's principal painter in the late 1400s and early 1500s, and a landscape such as this might have resonated with his local patrons.