Madonna and Child in a Garden

The Virgin sits facing us on a stone bench, her long fingers steepled in prayer over the sleeping Christ Child, who props his chin on crossed arms upon her knee; she wears a cherry-red dress beneath a teal-blue cloak that pools around her feet, while he is wrapped in forest green. Behind them an enclosed garden blooms in crimson and deep green, the round fruits of its orange trees hanging to either side of a vivid orange bench face, and along the top of the panel its own carved vine of gilt foliage opens into two roundels — the Archangel Gabriel at the left, the Virgin reading at her desk at the right — set in a ground of midnight blue. Cosmè Tura, the first great painter of Renaissance Ferrara, spent most of his life in the service of the d’Este dukes, and his highly personal style, with its fondness for taut, quivering line and deliberate exaggeration of form, is already fully present in this early devotional panel. The picture was with Harold Irving and Harriet Barnes Pratt of New York by 1917, reached the Samuel H. Kress Foundation through Wildenstein in December 1943, and was given to the National Gallery of Art in 1952. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.