Madonna del latte

For a long time this little panel was filed as the work of some anonymous Florentine copying a popular design by Filippo Lippi. Then technical examination changed the story. X-rays showed the painter repeatedly changing his mind as he worked, shifting the haloes, replacing the Virgin's plaited hair with a padded band. That kind of improvising belongs to the inventor of a picture, not a copyist, and the inventor here seems to be the young Andrea del Verrocchio, whose Florence workshop would soon train the boy Leonardo da Vinci. The Christ Child reaches hungrily for his mother and catches her little finger in his hand as she offers her breast.