Madonna and Child

This panel is 33 centimetres high. It was made in the early 1480s, when Butinone was taking on the biggest jobs of his life, and it was made for none of them. A picture this size hung in a room in a house, for one person to pray in front of, and the tempera is laid on with the same hard, precise drawing he gave to figures four times the scale. The composition follows a panel by Vincenzo Foppa now in the Castello Sforzesco, the one Milan calls the Madonna del libro, the Madonna of the book. It reached the museum in 1901, bought by Corrado Ricci, who had run the Brera since 1898 and was busy rehanging it school by school and filling the gaps in its Lombard rooms. It hangs in Room XI.