Italian, North, 'The Madonna and Child with Saints', about 1515

The Virgin Mary crosses her hands in adoration as she gazes down at the naked Christ Child who sleeps on a ledge or table in front of her. The surface is covered with a green cloth and partly by the Virgin’s blue and gold mantle, on which Christ lies. His head rests on his arms on a red cushion with gold tassels. The haloes are incised and gilded – one line for the saints' haloes and two for the Virgin’s.

The infant Christ’s sleep is intended to foreshadow his death. The atmosphere is solemn, as though the Virgin and saints are already mourning him. This type of composition with saints accompanying the Virgin in an informal grouping is known as a sacra conversazione or sacred conversation. However, the communication between the figures is on a spiritual rather than a verbal level. The sacra conversazione replaced earlier more hierarchical images of the Virgin and saints in which the Virgin would be portrayed larger than the other figures and raised up on a throne.

Saint Nicholas of Tolentino (who died in 1305, and was declared a saint in 1446) stands on the left of the picture wearing the habit of an Augustinian friar. He holds a lily and a book, and his chest glows with a sacred radiance as he gazes at the Virgin. Saint Nicholas was a popular local north Italian saint, born in the Marches, who was famed for his preaching and the miracles associated with it. He also appears in Lotto’s The Virgin and Child with Saints, painted in 1522 in Bergamo. Saint Anthony of Padua (who died in 1231, and was declared a saint in 1232) clasps his hands in prayer around a lily while contemplating the sleeping Christ. Saint Anthony was a Portuguese preacher of the Franciscan Order whose shrine is in Padua, where he died.

Both Saint Nicholas of Tolentino and Saint Anthony of Padua preached in north-eastern Italy, near Venice. The horizontal format of the painting with half-length figures was a popular choice in Venice and the Veneto in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as was this arrangement of figures set in a landscape with a cloth of honour hanging behind the Virgin. The colour combination of deep blue, rich red, moss green and white is also typical of Venetian paintings of this format from the time of Bellini’s Madonna of 1510 (Brera, Milan) and Titian’s Gypsy Madonna of 1510–11 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). This type of painting would have been used for private devotion at home.

When the painting was acquired it was believed to be by Moretto, an artist working in Brescia and Bergamo. However, it seems more likely that it is by a Venetian artist.