Madonna with the Child with Saint Simeon and saint Jerome

Two old men flank the Virgin and her child here, and the choice of who they are gives the picture its quiet charge. One is Saint Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, a familiar face in Venetian devotion. The other is rarer: Saint Simeon, the aged man who, in the Gospel story, was promised he would not die before he saw the Christ, and who held the infant in the Temple and asked to be let go in peace. To place him beside the living child folds that whole future into one calm group. Giovanni Agostino da Lodi came to Venice from Lombardy, and he brought with him a soft, smoky way of modelling faces learned in Milan. You can see it in the gentle shadows around the eyes and mouths, the features melting into shadow rather than drawn in hard lines.