Vierge à l’Enfant

In a format Venetian painters had long reserved for gold-ground icons, Cima da Conegliano sets the Virgin and Child out of doors: Mary, in her traditional red dress and blue mantle, holds the infant Jesus on her knee before a landscape that calls to mind the sunlit hills of the Friuli, the region where the painter was born. The Child gazes up at his mother and reaches to caress her face, and a warm late-afternoon light softens the whole scene — a devotional image renewed for the years around 1500, when Venetian painters, inspired by Tuscan models, first dared to show the Madonna in a natural setting. The panel repeats a prototype Cima dated 1496 (now in Udine), and it is exceptional among such repetitions in being painted by the master himself rather than delegated to his busy workshop, which normally produced the replicas. The panel comes from the Tuck collection and is held in the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.