The Virgin at the Fountain

Down in the lower right corner, on a small stone tablet, Jacopo de' Barbari copied out a line of the Roman poet Ovid. It comes from the Amores, from the poem in which Ovid answers his critics, and it says that envy feeds on the living and falls quiet after death, when each man's good name guards him as he deserves. Under it he set his initials.

The rest is a quiet devotional scene, small enough for a private room. The Virgin holds the Child between two saints, John the Baptist with a scroll reading Ecce Agnus Dei, behold the Lamb of God, and Anthony Abbot, the desert hermit. The Louvre dates it only broadly, to somewhere between 1475 and 1525. It was painted on wood and later transferred to canvas. It was with the Galichon family in Paris by 1861, and Roger Galichon left it to the Louvre in 1918.