Madonna and Child

Durer painted this Madonna in 1526, two years before his death, back home in Nuremberg. The city had by then gone over to the Reformation, and Durer, who admired Luther, spent his last years mostly on portraits and on his great pair of panels called the Four Apostles, given to the city that same year. Yet here he returns to an old, warm subject, the Virgin in a plain red dress holding a plump child against a black ground. The infant grips a pear, long read as a token of Mary's purity. Her gently smiling face owes something to the Netherlandish painters Durer had studied on his travels, while the child's pose recalls the Italians he had visited in Venice. It is one of the last of the many images of the Virgin he made across his life.