Madonnina

Almost everyone who has seen this knows it as a holy image, the Madonna of the Streets, printed on countless prayer cards with the Virgin cradling the infant Christ. Ferruzzi never painted it as anything religious. In 1897 he met a girl on a cold day in Venice, eleven-year-old Angelina Cian carrying her baby brother, and painted the two of them in plain peasant clothes. It won the top prize at the Venice Biennale that year, and only afterwards did people start seeing a Madonna in the tenderness of a working child holding a baby, and the devotional name stuck to it. There is one more twist. The original canvas has been lost for decades, its whereabouts unknown, and every version you have ever seen is a copy of a painting nobody can currently find.