The Expectant Madonna with Saint Joseph

In this tall, narrow panel painted in France in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, the Virgin Mary stands beside her husband Joseph with her hands pressed together, the prominent swelling of her gown making plain the mystery of the Incarnation she carries. The Expectant Madonna is a devotional image particular to the later Middle Ages, when the half-length Mary in an attitude of prayer was venerated as the Mother of God awaiting his birth; the unknown French master sets the pair against a flat gold ground, the Virgin’s dark blue mantle falling in broad, soft folds, with an absorbed tenderness in their exchange rather than the hieratic stiffness of earlier Gothic icons. The panel’s unusual shape and intimate scale point to a private chapel, and the quiet, refined handling shows French painting of the period at its most devout and elegant. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.