Virgin and Child

Francesco Squarcione ran the most important painting workshop in Padua in the mid-1400s. As many as 137 pupils are said to have passed through it, among them Andrea Mantegna, whom Squarcione adopted and then spent years suing in court. For all that influence, almost nothing survives that we can be sure he painted himself. This small Virgin and Child is one of only two works he signed, and he dated it 1455. Donatello was living in Padua in exactly those years, and you can feel the sculptor's crisp, carved line in the drawing. The child is shown asleep against his mother, in the visual language of the time a quiet foretelling of the death still to come.