Titian, 'The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ', about 1565-75

In the past, this painting was titled Mother and Child, as the figures in this very natural image of a mother breastfeeding show no obvious signs of holiness. However, most women of the time who were wealthy enough to own a painting of this quality would not have nursed their own infants but would have paid women known as ‘wet nurses’ to breastfeed their babies. Paintings of an anonymous mother and child were rare in sixteenth-century Italy, so the subject here is almost certainly the Virgin and Child. The choice of this subject for a painting was significant, and emphasised the Virgin’s humility, her devotion, and the sanctity of her milk.

The Virgin gazes at the infant Christ who sits on a white cloth her on lap and feeds from her breast. The naked child is encircled in his mother’s arms and twists away from us. We see very little of his face, just his brown hair and rosy red cheek, which echoes the red fringe of the Virgin’s brown headscarf over her shoulder. Our eye is drawn from the Virgin’s delicate fingers, up the line of her child’s back and to the expression of tenderness on her face, which is the painting’s focus.

Titian appears to be citing a very similar design by Michelangelo, preserved in a large drawing at Casa Buonarotti in Florence, although it is unclear how he would have seen it. His twisting Christ Child and powerfully built Virgin certainly evoke the grandeur and physical strength of his colleague’s figures, but he simultaneously brings a painterly softness and tenderness to his picture. The silvery harmonies of the pastel colours are combined with tremulous brushwork which make the solid forms of the Virgin and Child seem to dissolve into shimmering light. The surface of the painting has been flattened and worn from ironing during the process of relining [glossary:lining] and cleaning before 1962, and the pink lake glazes in the shadows of the Virgin’s lavender-grey dress have faded.

The elderly Titian may have kept this painting in his studio and worked on it during the last years of his life. The unblended brushstrokes and restrained colour scheme are typical of Titian’s very late works such as The Death of Actaeon, Christ Crowned with Thorns (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), and Nymph and Shepherd (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).