Virgin and Child

Boccaccio Boccaccino was a painter from Cremona in northern Italy who had spent formative time in Venice, and both cities show in a small panel like this: the soft Venetian handling of light on a compact, tender image of mother and child, set against an open landscape. He made it in the early 16th century, in the same years he was at work on his great commission, the fresco cycle in Cremona's cathedral showing the life of the Virgin, painted between 1506 and 1519. Intimate devotional panels of the Madonna and Child were the steady domestic counterpart to that public church work, meant for private prayer in a home. Boccaccino was among the leading painters of Cremona in his generation, and works by him are now scattered from the Uffizi to London to here in Bucharest.