Die betende Jungfrau

Sassoferrato painted this around 1640 in Rome, at a time when the city's churches were filling with the swirling drama of the Baroque. He went the other way. The Virgin bows her head and folds her hands in prayer, filling the panel almost life-size against a plain dark ground, with nothing to distract from her, worked in little more than red, white and blue. The style looks a full century out of date on purpose, closer to Raphael and Perugino, both dead more than 100 years, than to anything fashionable around him. That was deliberate. The Catholic reform movement prized quiet, personal prayer, and pictures like this were made to be knelt before at home. He returned to the same praying Virgin many times.