Nursing Madonna

By 1570, the Catholic Church in Spain was tightening the rules for religious images. The Council of Trent had just closed, and it wanted holy pictures to move the faithful to devotion without giving anyone cause for scandal. You can see that caution here. Where earlier painters showed the Virgin's bare breast as she fed the infant Christ, Morales keeps her covered, her hand lifting only the edge of a veil while the child turns inward toward her. His contemporaries called him El Divino, the Divine, for the tenderness and polish of scenes exactly like this. He returned to this composition again and again; four versions of it hang in the Prado today.