Giovanni Santi, 'The Virgin and Child', perhaps about 1488

The Virgin Mary bends over the sleeping Christ Child, the diagonal incline of her body paralleled by that of her son’s. Her lips are parted – perhaps she’s singing her child to sleep. Christ is balanced rather precariously on a red cushion on a parapet. His head rests in his mother’s hand and one arm hangs down limply. His sleep presages his death, and his coral necklace symbolises the blood he will shed during the Passion.

The artist has put the Virgin and Child in a rather confusing space: they are behind one parapet and in front of another, which bends away on the left behind Christ’s halo. A silver brocade cloth of honour, creased from being folded, hangs behind the Virgin, and rich brocade curtains hang at the top. In the background a mountainous landscape recedes into the blue distance.

This is the finest among the surviving small-scale images of the Virgin and Child by Giovanni Santi, father of Raphael, and a successful painter, poet and courtier in Urbino. Santi, like other Renaissance artists, often borrowed figures and motifs from other painters. The Child’s pose was probably invented by Giovanni Bellini, whose Virgin with the Sleeping Child on a Parapet of about 1465 (Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, Boston) is very similar, though in reverse. The parapet, Cloth of Honour and the rich textiles, as well as the landscape with its clumps of spherical trees and distant blue mountains, are all typical of Netherlandish paintings, such as The Virgin and Child by Dirk Bouts. Santi knew Justus of Ghent, and praised Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden in the rhymed chronicle he wrote.

Although he was clearly familiar with Netherlandish painting, Santi did not assimilate its techniques. He continued to paint in tempera, in contrast to the technique of applying layers and layers of semi-translucent glazes adopted by his contemporary Pietro Perugino, and his figures seem flat and hard. The flesh painting is solid and opaque, the result of using relatively large amounts of lead white pigment, not just for highlights but for mid-tones and shadows.