Madonna and Child (Madonna del Latte)

On 4 May 1851 Gustave Flaubert, then 29 and making his way home from a long journey through Egypt and the Near East, wrote from Rome that he was in love with Murillo's Virgin in the Galleria Corsini. Her head haunted him, he said, and her eyes kept passing before him like two dancing lanterns. That September, back in Normandy, he began writing Madame Bovary.

This is the picture he meant. Murillo painted it in Seville in the first half of the 1670s, and the museum sees in it his gift for telling a sacred subject as a family story, built on just two figures. Mary is nursing the Child, and both turn their deep, dark eyes towards us, as though we had walked in on them. Their almost ordinary, working-class features earned the canvas a 19th-century nickname, the Gipsy Madonna.

It reached the Corsini as a gift. Gian Bernardino Pontici, a poet of the Arcadian academy and Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini's private secretary, gave it to the cardinal, who hung it in his own bedroom. An X-ray taken during the restoration of 2021 showed that Murillo had first used the canvas for a kneeling Saint Francis, and traces of the saint's book and habit still show through.