The Madonna of Humility

The Madonna of Humility shows the Virgin seated low upon the ground rather than upon a throne, embodying the virtue of humility that this devotional image type was made to celebrate. Masaccio, the founder of Renaissance painting in Florence, here brings the monumental gravity of his revolutionary frescoes to a small domestic altarpiece, endowing the intimate scene with a strikingly sculptural sense of the human body. Painted about 1423 and 1424, early in the artist’s brief but transformative career, the panel survives in a heavily abraded and reconstructed state that hints at the austere power he introduced to Italian art before his death at twenty-six.