Possibly by Antonello da Messina, 'The Virgin and Child', about 1460-9

The Virgin Mary glances down at her baby son, Christ, who clutches a pomegranate in his tiny fist. The fruit, with its blood-red juice, was a reminder of the torture and death he would face at the Crucifixion. Mary was also known as the Queen of Heaven and her coronation by Christ was a popular subject in Renaissance painting. Here, two tiny hovering angels place a solid gold crown encrusted with pearls and gemstones upon her head, its magnificence matching that of her brocade gown, jewelled cloak and translucent veil.

The excess of decorative detail reflects paintings by fifteenth-century Netherlandish artists who relished depicting a variety of textures and finishes accurately, something enabled through their great skill at painting using oil. Their works were hugely popular in southern Europe, including Sicily and Naples where Antonello was born and trained – Alfonso of Aragon, King of Naples, owned a triptych by Rogier van der Weyden. Artists in the region sought to imitate the lavish detail of these works, as well as the oil painting technique used to achieve it. Niccolo Colantonio, Antonello’s master in Naples, was a copyist of the most famous Netherlandish painter, Jan van Eyck.

Our painting is certainly by an artist hoping to evoke the style of his Northern European counterparts. Cracks in the surface of this picture – the result of painting over layers of still-wet paint – show an artist still grappling with oil paint, perhaps Antonello at the beginning of his career. By the end of his life, Antonello had reached a level of skill in the medium that was rare in his Italian contemporaries; see, for example, the various textures he recreated in his Saint Jerome. In The Virgin and Child, the jewels are not painted with the same precision as the objects in Jerome’s study, and the folds of the Virgin’s cloak and veil seem almost random, suggesting they were not painted from life. The dark background, strong lighting and simple shapes are also features of Antonello’s early works: a painting in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, which is dated to his early years as a painter in the 1460s, has an almost identical composition, elements of which derive from earlier pictures made in southern Europe.

The lack of expression or communication of the thoughts of the holy figures has led to the suggestion that this work cannot be by Antonello, who was so expert at conveying psychological depth (see, for example, his Portrait of a Man). One possibility is that it is by Antonello’s brother, Giordano, or by his apprentice Paolo de Chaco, whom he took on in 1457. But there were many painters working in this style in southern Europe at this time, and their works and names are now lost, making it very difficult to know our painter’s identity.