Madonna and Child

Around 1520, when this was painted, the younger painters of Florence, Andrea del Sarto and his pupil Pontormo among them, were stretching figures and colour in unsettling new directions. Lorenzo di Credi, by then in his sixties, went on working much as he always had, with smooth surfaces and a calm, even light.

The Virgin here is nursing the Child, an old devotional type known as the Madonna lactans. A picture of this modest size was usually made for prayer at home rather than for a church altar.

It did not survive in its original form. At some point the paint was lifted from its wooden panel and laid onto canvas, a rescue restorers often carried out on old panels in the 18th and 19th centuries. The painting reached Cincinnati in 1927 in the bequest of Mary Emery, a local philanthropist whose old masters also included works by Titian and Mantegna.