Follower of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, 'The Virgin and Child', probably about 1500

The Virgin Mary stands behind a parapet on which the Christ Child is seated. She rests her hand on a book, and Christ holds an apple – it symbolises the Fall of Man, from which he was believed to offer redemption. With the other, he twists to reach out for the flower his mother offers him.

Painted in around 1500, this small panel is one of a number of pictures of the Virgin and Child which show at various removes the impact of Leonardo da Vinci’s revolutionary style of painting. The artist was an anonymous follower of Boltraffio, who was Leonardo’s best pupil.

Many images of the Virgin and Child painted at this period – by this artist and by other imitators of Leonardo, such as Marco d‘Oggiono, Giampietrino, Andrea Solario – were variations on Leonardo’s Madonna Litta (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) of around 1491–5. Here, the Virgin’s profile is sharply outlined against a dark wall pierced with windows that show distant views, as in the Madonna Litta. Other elements, however, come from elsewhere: the composition and simple colour scheme of the Virgin’s clothes – red, green and blue – recall Marco d’Oggiono’s Madonna of the Violets (Collection De Navarro) of about 1498–1500; Christ’s twisting body seems inspired by Boltraffio’s Headless Body of a Child, turning to the Right (Louvre, Paris) while his gesture harks back to The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist.

The painter of our panel seems to have been in the habit of creating collages based on bits of compositions by other artists. The views through the windows are perhaps where the artist expressed his own personality – a tiny female figure does the washing in a river on the left, and a man with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder walks through the fields on the right.