Mary with Child

This is one of the last pictures Fra Bartolomeo painted, from around 1514 to 1516, shortly before his death, and it reached Vienna by a long road. It belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, who assembled one of the great picture collections of the 17th century in Brussels and took it home to Vienna in 1656.

The panel has been cut down on every side, which is why the curtains stop so abruptly at the edges and the thin gold halos run off the top. For viewers of the time, a hanging parted around a figure was the cloth of honour set behind a ruler. Inside that frame the scene is close and private. Mary presses her cheek to her son's and holds him with both hands, while he wraps an arm round her neck and looks straight out at the viewer.