Madonna and Child

Romanino was working in Brescia again around 1516, a few years after French troops stormed the city in February 1512 and killed thousands of its people in a day. This panel is a house picture rather than an altarpiece, a little over 80 centimetres high, made for prayer in a private room. The Virgin reaches across to hold back the Child, who is squirming on a heavy cushion spread with a white cloth. The sharp metallic folds of that cloth show how closely he had been looking at northern European painting.

For most of its life it belonged to a churchman rather than a church. It is still called the Madonna Monti, after Cesare Monti, archbishop of Milan in the 1630s and 40s, who left more than 200 paintings to the archdiocese. Brera's director Giuseppe Bertini arranged an exchange with Cardinal Andrea Carlo Ferrari in 1895, and the panel has hung here, in Room 18, ever since.