Virgin with Child

By about 1530, when this Madonna was painted, Maarten van Heemskerck was a young painter in Haarlem who had never seen Italy. Italy had come to him instead. Jan van Scorel, a fellow Dutchman just back from Rome, was working in the same town in those years, and the Italian manner he carried north kept turning up in the pictures of the painters around him. This is one of Heemskerck's earliest known works, and that new influence is already in it. The Virgin and the Christ child sit not against gold or a bare wall but before a wide landscape that opens into pale blue distance, the southern habit of giving sacred figures real air and depth. He would only make the journey to Rome himself two years later.