Madonna and Child

Low on this panel runs a Latin signature, Barnabas de Mutina pinxit, Barnaba of Modena painted it, followed by the date in Roman numerals, 1370. By then Barnaba had been working in Genoa for about nine years, and Madonnas like this one were shipped from the port to Piedmont to stand on the altars of the mendicant orders, the churches of the Franciscan and Dominican friars.

The Child holds a scroll with a line from Luke's Gospel, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it. In Luke, Jesus says it when a woman in the crowd calls out that the womb that bore him is blessed, and medieval readers took it as praise of his mother too, since she was the one who had heard the word and kept it. The museum sees in the panel the lively naturalism of Barnaba's training in Emilia joined to the solemn Byzantine manner loved in Liguria. The gallery bought it in 1875 from a lawyer, Giovanni Vignola.