Madonna and Child and Saints

This altarpiece was painted around 1515 for a church in Milan, Santa Maria del Giardino, where the Virgin and Child sit enthroned among eight saints in the calm, still grouping Italians called a sacra conversazione. Its maker, Bartolomeo Suardi, was nicknamed Bramantino, little Bramante, after the great architect he trained under, and the debt shows. His figures stand in a severe, measured architecture, weighty and almost sculptural, far from the soft grace fashionable elsewhere. Bramantino spent his career in Milan in the wake of Leonardo, whose years in the city had reshaped what local painting could attempt. The panel later passed to the collector Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, and with his bequest it entered the Uffizi.