Madonna mit schlafendem Kind

This is a small thing, about the size of a large book, meant not for an altar but for someone's private room. Mantegna stripped away the usual signs of holiness. There are no haloes and no gold, just a black ground and a young mother pressing her sleeping baby to her cheek. He borrowed the pose from Donatello's carved reliefs, where Mary's face leans in to touch the child. She does not look joyful. The sleep of an infant was often read as a foreshadowing of his death, and her grave, inward expression seems to carry that knowledge. Painted in tempera on canvas rather than wood, it has the plainness of a figure observed from life, a real woman and a real child rather than a queen of heaven.