Garland with the Virgin, the Christ Child and two Angels

Two names sit on the Prado's label for this small copper plate: Jan Brueghel the Elder and Giulio Cesare Procaccini, a painter from Bologna who worked in Milan. Both of them served Federico Borromeo, the cardinal archbishop of Milan, and he is the likely patron. The date is around 1619. Mary holds the Christ Child on one arm and one of his feet with the other hand, and behind them two angels watch. One of the angels looks straight out and asks for silence. Around the whole scene runs a thick garland of flowers, and the reason it is there is an argument. Protestant writers rejected the worship of images; a Catholic answer was to set a holy image inside a frame of living things, so beautiful that it made the case for looking. The plate is 48 centimetres by 36, and the garland takes up more of it than the figures do.