Madonna and Child

Writing in the 16th century, the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari said Baldovinetti loved to paint landscape just as he saw it, with rivers, bridges, stones, plants, roads, fields, towns and castles. This panel, which the Louvre dates to around 1464, shows what he meant. Behind the Virgin, her hands pressed together in prayer, a broad valley opens as if seen from a hilltop, a river looping through it in pale bends until it fades into blue hills. In front, on a marble ledge, the Child props one hand on a red cushion and plays with a strip of thin white cloth.

Before 1862 the picture belonged to the comte Duchâtel, a collector and a former minister of King Louis-Philippe. In 1898 the Louvre bought it with help from the Société des Amis du Louvre, a society of private donors founded the year before. In 2019 the museum showed it in its Leonardo exhibition, among the paintings of the Florence where the young Leonardo trained.