Madonna col Bambino tra i santi Michele arcangelo e Andrea

Cima painted this altarpiece around 1497 for a church just outside the walls of Parma, a building torn down in 1546. The Virgin sits with the Christ child between two saints, the armoured archangel Michael on one side and the apostle Andrew with his cross on the other, set before cool ruined stonework in the clear even light of the Venetian mainland where Cima worked. For more than a century afterward the panel carried a false inscription and was owned as a work by Leonardo da Vinci. Only in 1834, when it passed into the ducal gallery of Parma, was it correctly returned to Cima. Behind the figures he set a distant hill town, Collalto, close to his own birthplace up in the Veneto.