Madonna with Child and an Angel

This picture is small, wider than it is tall, and it was never meant for an altar. By the 1540s Moretto was supplying Brescian households with devotional paintings of exactly this kind, the Madonna and Child seen close up at half length, an angel leaning in from the left to offer the baby a garland of roses. The formula worked, and several versions of it survive. Behind the figures a green curtain, painted with shot highlights that shift where the cloth turns, is pulled back to show plain blue sky. The picture reached Brera in 1911 from the collection of Gustavo Frizzoni, a Milanese scholar who attributed paintings by comparing small anatomical details, the method he had learned from Giovanni Morelli.