La Vierge au rosier

Luini painted this in Milan not long after Leonardo da Vinci had worked in the city, and you can feel the older master in it, the soft smoky modelling of the faces, the tenderness that never tips into sweetness. It is a work of Luini's youth, once thought to have been made for the great charterhouse at Pavia, though no document proves it. The Virgin sits before a dense screen of white roses, the flower long tied to Mary, walling the pair into a private garden. The Child reaches for the stem of a columbine and its small red bloom, a quiet sign of the Passion still to come. Behind the roses the trellis closes off the outside world completely.