Adoração do Menino

Bramantino was barely twenty when he laid out this small Adoration, and you can see what was on his mind. Milan in the 1480s was the city of the architect Bramante, whose handling of perspective the young painter admired so much that he took the older man's name as his own. Every line of the ruined architecture here drives back to a single point set right at the Virgin's hands, in the centre of the panel. Around the kneeling Child are Saints Bernardino, Francis and Benedict, with a row of angel musicians perched on a stone base behind them. It was the same decade Leonardo da Vinci arrived in Milan, and that appetite for rigorous, measured space was everywhere in the air.