Madonna and Child

Around 1510 Boccaccio Boccaccino was the leading painter of Cremona, a city in the Po valley between Milan and Venice. He had worked in Venice itself and learned from Giovanni Bellini, the master who had turned the half-length Madonna, the Virgin shown close and tender with her child, into a whole tradition. Pictures like this follow that Venetian model, the mother and infant set against a cloth of honour with a strip of distant landscape beyond. Boccaccino would soon take on his largest task, the frescoes across the front of Cremona's cathedral telling the life of the Virgin, and he founded a painting school in the city that shaped the next generation there. This intimate panel, meant for private prayer rather than a public altar, entered the Bucharest collection among its many early Italian works.