The Virgin at the Crib

The picture is known in Italian as the Madonna della paglia, the Madonna of the Straw, after the bed the Child is lying on. Mary holds him asleep against her, so the canvas is a nativity and a nursing Virgin at the same time, and the white cloth wrapped around him and the sheaves of wheat in the foreground both look ahead, to the Passion and the Resurrection. Van Dyck painted it in Genoa between 1625 and 1627, during his years in Italy, and its first owner was Cornelis de Wael, a Flemish painter and dealer settled in that city. From there it went north to Antwerp before it was bought in Rome in 1753. An inventory of 1784 describes it simply as an original by van Dyck, a Madonna with the Child at her breast, sleeping as if in a manger.