圣母子

This is a small thing, only about a foot high, made to be held or set on a private altar for prayer, not to hang in a gallery. Duccio painted it in Siena around 1300, at the very start of the 14th century, when Italian painters were just beginning to loosen the flat gold formulas they had inherited from Byzantium. Look at what the Christ child is doing. He reaches up and pushes aside his mother's veil, a small human gesture that was genuinely new, and she meets it with a quiet, knowing sadness. Along the bottom edge of the frame are little scorch marks, left by devotional candles that once burned just beneath it. The Metropolitan bought this panel in 2004 for a reported 45 million dollars, the most it had ever paid, and it holds one of the only Duccios outside Europe.