Virgin of the Veil

The Child is asleep, and the cloth under him carries the meaning. Late medieval devotion had built a habit of seeing the sleeping infant as the dead Christ foreseen, much of it coming out of the Meditations on the Life of Christ, a book read all over Europe and then believed to be by Bonaventure. The veil he lies on stands for the shroud.

Bergognone painted this around 1513, late in a long career. Two Carthusian monks kneel at prayer in the background, which is the reason the panel is thought to have come from the Certosa di Pavia, the monastery where he had spent years working.

A close variant of the same composition is in a private collection. There the Child holds cherries, the cloth beneath him is yellow, and the water and island behind are replaced by the country around the Certosa.