Nursing Madonna

The brotherhood that ordered this picture, the Raccomandati of Fabriano in the Marche, looked after children who had been left with nobody. When they commissioned a processional standard from Luca Signorelli in the early 1480s, the face they put in front was the Virgin in glory feeding her child, which is the charity they practised turned into an image. On the back of the same banner was a Flagellation, the penance they practised on themselves.

The church it was made for, Santa Maria del Mercato, has since disappeared. The banner itself did not survive as one object either. When Napoleon's administration suppressed the religious brotherhoods and the picture came to Brera in 1811, the two faces had already been separated, and the museum took them in as two paintings rather than one. The nursing Virgin was entered as number 347, the Flagellation as 327 to 347, and they are still listed that way today.