Virgin and Child

By 1524 Antwerp was the busiest port in northern Europe, and its painters' workshops had turned devotion into a trade. Virgin-and-Child panels like this one were made in quantity, often on speculation, then shipped to buyers across the continent. This small oak panel is a Madonna lactans, the Virgin shown nursing, and here the Christ Child has fallen asleep at the breast. That sleeping infant was a familiar note in these pictures. Buyers of the time would have read the child's sleep as a gentle foreshadowing of his death, so the tender domestic moment carried a second, sadder meaning. The painter is known only by the group of panels gathered under his hand, all of them soft-faced Madonnas and holy families of exactly this kind. This one made its way from Antwerp to Basel, where it hangs today.