Virgin and Child

The Virgin sits in a quiet melancholy, the Christ Child resting on her lap as his hand reaches toward the cherries she holds, the fruit that in devotional painting stood for the sweetness of paradise and, in its red, for the Passion to come. The panel is the work of Ercole de’Roberti, who trained in Bologna and from 1486 served the brilliant court of the Este at Ferrara, and his mannerisms are unmistakable in the long, attenuated fingers that seem hardly to touch the child even as they press into his flesh. Painted in the last years of the fifteenth century, it shows the Ferrarese taste for pale, jewelled colour and expressive line at its most refined. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.