Madonna col Bambino

In 1621 a Flemish painter in his early twenties left Antwerp for Italy, and spent the next few years moving between Genoa, Rome and Venice with a notebook, copying everything. What caught him hardest was Titian, the warm skin tones and the soft Venetian colour, and you can see that study here in a quiet half-length of the Virgin holding the sleeping child. It is a small, private devotional picture, one of a group of Madonnas van Dyck worked out during those Italian years while he was still absorbing what the older Venetian masters had done a lifetime before. The canvas reached Parma in 1820, bought for the city by Marie Louise, the former empress who had become duchess here after Napoleon's fall.