Madonna with child

Parmigianino painted this small Madonna and Child around 1525, in the months after he arrived in Rome to make his name. It was made for private devotion, an object to be held close in a bedroom or study rather than set on an altar. A fuller version of the same composition hangs in the Doria Pamphilj gallery in Rome, and its shape shows it once formed a folding diptych, paired with a small Nativity that the owner could open and close. This Uffizi panel is Parmigianino's own reduced replica of that design, worked on the same idea at a smaller scale.