Bronzino, 'The Madonna and Child with Saints', probably about 1540

Elderly Saint Elizabeth looks down over the Virgin Mary’s shoulder at her son John the Baptist. Before miraculously conceiving him in old age, Saint Elizabeth was unable to have children. The Christ Child removes a garland of flowers from his head, symbolising innocence or childish pleasure. He grasps the reed cross held by the infant Saint John the Baptist, who wears his camel-skin cloak and carries a baptismal bowl (when Christ is an adult, his cousin John will use the bowl to baptise him in the river Jordan).

The reed cross foreshadows the Crucifixion, and by grasping it Christ accepts his destiny to die for the salvation of humanity. The wild strawberries Saint John offers may refer to Christ’s fruitful and righteous life, and their colour may also be a reminder of the blood he spilled during the Passion.

The picture was painted around 1540, perhaps for an acquaintance of Bronzino’s at the court of Duke Cosimo I de‘ Medici in Florence. It is close in style to the frescoes Bronzino painted in the Chapel of Eleonora of Toledo (the Duke’s wife) in the Palazzo Vecchio in around 1541–2. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari described ’two large pictures of Our Lady with other figures, beautiful to behold, and carried out with infinite diligence‘ that Bronzino painted for Bartolomeo Panciatichi. The first of these, which includes a flag of the Panciatichi arms, is in the Uffizi, Florence, as is a portrait of Panciatichi by Bronzino. It has been suggested that the National Gallery’s painting may be the other Madonna painted for Panciatichi, although it is not of the same very high quality as the Uffizi picture.

The rocky background provides little sense of depth, making the figures seem very close to the picture’s surface, like a relief sculpture. In 1546, Benedetto Varchi, a Florentine intellectual, asked the leading artists of his time about the relative merits of the arts of painting and sculpture – a debate known as the paragone. Although defending painting, Bronzino’s unfinished reply shows that he was particularly interested in sculpture. He claimed that painting was the finest of the arts because it could both evoke the three-dimensional qualities of sculpture and imitate nature in a way that sculpture could not. The ’sculptural’ style of painting that Bronzino favoured is evident here in the figures, the clearly outlined forms and the cool, flawless quality of his brushwork.

In 1914 it was noted that the remains of a signature were still visible. It read ‘B.ONZO FL..ETINO’, which stood for ‘Bronzino Florentino’, meaning Bronzino from Florence.