The Virgin Nursing the Child

Around the Virgin's head, scratched into the gold of her halo, runs a line of Latin, Nigra sum sed formosa, I am black but beautiful. It comes from the Song of Songs, the love poem of the Bible, where the bride explains that the sun has darkened her skin, and medieval preachers read that bride as the Church and as Mary herself. The woman Bartolomeo Vivarini painted here is pale, though, her head bent over the Child, who grips the breast with both hands as he feeds, and the Louvre admits that the inscription is not easy to explain. The panel is an early work, from about 1450 to 1455, years when Bartolomeo still signed altarpieces jointly with his elder brother Antonio. It turned up at a Paris auction in 2006 under his name, and the collector Jean-François Costa gave it to the Louvre in 2011.