The Madonna of the Carnation

Dürer painted this in 1516, at home in Nuremberg and by then working for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. The Child holds a single carnation. Its clove-like bud had long been linked to the nails of the Crucifixion, and the German name for the flower, Nelke, comes from a word for a little nail, so a viewer would read it as a quiet reminder of the Passion. Dürer sets the Virgin square to us, almost rigidly frontal, a pose the museum compares to early icons of the Virgin, far from the softer Madonnas he had seen in Venice a decade before. The picture is unusual in its making too, painted on parchment laid onto a limewood panel. By 1607 it was already in the private gallery of Maximilian I of Bavaria in Munich.