Madonna and Child (Madonna of the Jasmine)

Philip Neri, the Florentine priest who founded the Congregation of the Oratory in Rome, died in 1595 and was made a saint in 1622. In Verona the painter Dario Pozzo, who died in 1652, painted an altarpiece of his ecstasy for the church of San Francesco di Paola. For the vision the saint beholds, Pozzo used this older canvas, setting it into the middle of his own painting and framing it like a relic.

Giolfino had painted it around 1510, early in his career. The Virgin sits in a kind of niche of jasmine leaves which, as the museum puts it, seem to protect the sleep of the Child, whose pose it finds tenderly true to life. Behind them opens a Gothic town bristling with towers, on the shore of a lake or perhaps the sea.