Madonna and Child (Moscardo Madonna)

There is a second version of this Madonna in the National Gallery in London, and it is a mirror image, the whole design reversed. The two museums read the pair differently. Castelvecchio dates its own panel to around 1510 and calls the London one the replica, perhaps a fragment of a larger altarpiece built on the same design. The National Gallery dates its panel later, probably to the 1520s, and suggests that it was the model, because guide lines for the halo, the curtain rod and the wall mouldings were incised into it before painting, and the Verona picture has none.

The name comes from Lodovico Moscardo, a Veronese nobleman of the 17th century whose collection of antiquities, minerals and paintings was famous enough for him to publish a catalogue of it in 1656. On either side of the Virgin, small landscapes open up, which the museum compares to the backgrounds of Northern painting.