The Sleep of the Infant Jesus

In August 1662 a quarrel in Rome between men of the French embassy and the pope's Corsican guards ended with the guards firing on the Palazzo Farnese, where the French ambassador lived. Louis XIV treated it as an insult to his crown. Under the peace signed at Pisa two years later, Pope Alexander VII had to send his own nephew, Cardinal Flavio Chigi, to France as legate to apologise in person. This painting had belonged to the pope, and it came to Louis XIV in 1664 through that same cardinal.

It is a very quiet picture. The Virgin, in a red dress, holds the sleeping Child upright against her, his cheek on her breast and his hands folded under his chin. Angels crowd close around them, one at the upper left with a book, and another at the lower left drawing a white cloth over a stone ledge.

The king's inventory of 1683 took it for the work of Andrea Solario, another painter active in Milan, and Solario's name stayed attached to it for a long time. The Louvre now catalogues it as Luini's and dates it to around 1525 to 1530. It was painted on a wooden panel and later transferred to canvas, and it hangs in the Grande Galerie.