The Virgin and Child between Saint Matthew and an Angel (Madonna della Scala)

A Florentine banker named Lorenzo Jacopi ordered this panel around 1522, and he chose his saint carefully. The man seated on the left in pink is Matthew, who had been a tax collector before he was called, and so the patron of anyone whose trade was money. The angel beside him holds the open book. Mary sits above them on a flight of stone steps, which is where the picture got the name it has carried for centuries, the Madonna della Scala. What happened to it afterwards is a small map of 17th-century politics. It reached the collection of Charles I of England, and when Parliament sold off the royal pictures after his execution, the Spanish ambassador in London, Alonso de Cardenas, was buying for Philip IV. The panel went to Madrid, then to the monastery of El Escorial, and in the distance behind the Virgin a woman is hurrying away with a child.