Giorgio Schiavone, 'The Virgin and Child', about 1456-60

The Virgin and Christ Child are framed by a glossary:classical| marble arch decorated swags of fruit and sculpted glossary:putti. Christ balances precariously on the sill, uncertain on his feet; his anxious mother clearly thinks he is about to fall off the edge. In a gesture familiar to all parents of toddlers, she holds her hand near enough to catch him if he stumbles, and he reaches out towards her to steady himself.

Christ holds a pear but is more interested in a bowl of cherries offered to him by a naked putto; look closely and you can see a translucent moth has landed on top of them. Versions of the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet – Alpha and Omega – appear on the glossary:pilasters on either side of the arch. This is a title given to Christ in the Book of Revelation. Behind the figures, a rich green curtain partly conceals a hilly landscape. We see a dead tree – a prefiguration of the Cross on which Christ would be crucified – and ships sailing on the sea in the distance.

This is one of a small number of paintings we can attribute with confidence to Giorgio Schiavone, an artist trained in Italy but from Dalmatia (a historical region of modern-day Croatia). One of the others, the San Niccolò Altarpiece, is also in our collection. The two do not look especially alike, but some of the features of this painting are found in a Virgin and Child signed by Schiavone, now in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore: the tenderness of the Virgin supporting the slightly wobbly Christ on a parapet, her cool expression, the paired cherubs, the swags of fruit. The painting of this panel is less accomplished than that of the Baltimore picture and the San Niccolò altarpiece, and many of the details are also found in a Virgin and Child by Schiavone’s teacher, Squarcione (now in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin). It was perhaps done early on in Schiavone’s apprenticeship to Squarcione.

Squarcione was known for encouraging his students to look at classical art, and the swags of fruit are playful versions of ones he might have seen on classical sculpture. Similar foliage is found in the works of other pupils of Squarcione, including Andrea Mantegna and Marco Zoppo. Schiavone also looked at more recent art and picked ideas from different sources, in particular from followers of Donatello. The stance of the child balancing on the ledge and the Virgin’s not-quite-touching hands are also found in a bronze in Donatello’s style now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. The sculptural niche hung with leafy festoons and decorated with putti is found in two terracottas possibly by Giovanni da Pisa (Institute of Arts, Detroit and Sammlungen des regierenden Fürsten von Liechtenstein, Vaduz).