The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ

In 1545 Titian went to Rome, and Michelangelo came to see him at work. The painter Giorgio Vasari, who was there, reports that the Florentine admired the colour and regretted that Venetians were not taught to draw. At least 20 years later, Titian seems to have had one of Michelangelo's compositions in mind when he painted this small canvas. The Virgin bends her head over the Child as he feeds, and he twists away from us, wrapped in her arms. The National Gallery traces the path of the eye from her fingers, up the line of his back, to her face. The grandeur is borrowed, but the handling belongs to the painter's old age, loose strokes left unblended, a narrow range of colour and a silvery light in which solid forms begin to dissolve. It came to the Gallery in 1924 with the bequest of the chemist and collector Ludwig Mond.