Madone de Brera

Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, commissioned this around 1472 to mark the birth of his son and heir, Guidobaldo. He kneels at the lower right in full armour, having taken off his helmet and gauntlets out of respect, one of the sharpest profile portraits of the age. Above the sleeping Christ child and the ring of saints, Piero opens the space into a solemn stone apse, and from the shell of its half-dome he hangs a single egg on a thread. That egg has kept people arguing for centuries. An ostrich egg was a heraldic emblem of the Montefeltro, so it points to the newborn duke; the shell above it echoes the old idea of the pearl born without a father, a figure for the virgin birth. Federico's wife had died giving birth to Guidobaldo, which gives the quiet, grave mood of the whole panel its weight.