Madonna and Child

Pilgrims who sailed from Venice to the Holy Land in these years were taken, in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to a slab of stone on which, by tradition, Christ's body had been laid and anointed before burial. That slab is what the Child lies on here. The museum reads this small panel as an allegory of the Passion. The baby is asleep, sleep stands for death, the marble ledge is the stone of unction, and the Virgin, praying with her eyes half closed, already anticipates her lament over her dead son.

Bonsignori signed and dated it in 1483, as a young man. The gentle face under the white veil shows that he knew Giovanni Bellini's Madonnas. Everything else is harder. Her hands look carved from wood, the folds of her red mantle crumple sharply, and the Child is foreshortened on a steep diagonal, in a way the museum traces to Andrea Mantegna.