Madonna col Bambino

Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted this small panel in Siena around 1320, a generation into a change that was loosening Italian painting from its stiff Byzantine models. You can see the shift in the Christ child. He is wrapped tight in swaddling bands like an infant of the time, yet he twists and reaches with a weight and softness that older gold-ground Madonnas never had. Lorenzetti would go on, in the 1330s, to paint the great halls of Siena's town hall with scenes of good and bad government. Here, early in his career, the ambition is smaller and closer, one mother holding a squirming child against a field of gold.