Madonna with Child

Around 1470, the date the museum gives this panel, a small Madonna like this was a picture a Venetian family kept at home for private prayer. Before it came to Verona it belonged to the Tiepolo, an old patrician family of Venice, no relation of the 18th-century painter of that name. The Child stands on a stone ledge, and the Virgin holds him with her hands crossed over his body. The museum points to those hands, and to the look passing between mother and son, as the centre of the picture. Time has worn away some of the paint. The colour is held almost to a single tone, and what variation there is comes from the light on the skin and on the Virgin's veil, a warm brown the museum compares to a nun's.