Roberto Ferruzzi

You have almost certainly seen this painting even if the name means nothing to you: a young woman wrapped in a shawl, cradling a sleeping child, her head tilted down. It hangs in countless homes and on prayer cards as the 'Madonna of the Streets,' an image of the Virgin and the infant Christ. Roberto Ferruzzi never meant it as a religious picture at all.

He painted it in 1897, and it won the top prize at the second Venice Biennale, the international art exhibition that had just been founded. The model was a local girl of about eleven named Angelina Cian, the second of fifteen children, holding one of her younger siblings. The public read a Madonna into it anyway, and the reading stuck so completely that the picture escaped its painter and became a devotional object.

Ferruzzi worked around Venice and the Veneto for decades and painted a great deal else, portraits and landscapes and rural scenes. Almost none of it is remembered. Angelina, the girl in the shawl, later emigrated to California and spent her last years in a psychiatric hospital, dying in 1972.