Madonna and Child

The Virgin sits on clouds with her feet resting on a crescent moon. The image comes from the Book of Revelation, the woman clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet, and by the middle of the 17th century Catholic painters used it for the Virgin conceived without sin, a belief Rome was then favouring ever more openly. Pope Alexander VII defended it in a bull of 1661, although it became dogma only in 1854. The Child in her arms holds a rosary that ends in a rose, a play on the word itself, since the Latin rosarium means a rose garden. Heads of cherubs rise from the clouds around them. The museum dates the canvas only approximately, to around 1650, and singles out what marks much of Sassoferrato's large output of devotional pictures, a solid design and bright, almost enamelled colour.