Madonna col Bambino e santi

Lotto painted this small canvas in 1534, soon after he moved to the Marche, the hilly region on Italy's Adriatic side. He was in his fifties by then and had never quite settled, drifting between Venice, Bergamo and these smaller towns in search of work. The scene is a family one. The Virgin reclines with the Christ Child against a cushion, watched over by her parents, Anne and Joachim, while Saint Jerome kneels to the side. Lotto signed his name right on that cushion. It is a private, domestic kind of holy picture, made to be prayed to in a room rather than seen across a church. Long after, it entered the collection of a Medici prince in Florence, and it has hung in the Uffizi since 1798.