Valerio Castello, 'The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist', about 1650

A youthful Virgin Mary looks tenderly down at her son, the infant Christ Child, wriggling on her lap. Christ reaches out to embrace Saint John the Baptist, identifiable by the reed cross he holds and the scroll whose inscription – ‘ECCE [AGNU]S DEI’ (‘Behold the Lamb of God’) – refers to the words the Baptist spoke on recognising Christ as the Messiah. The Virgin’s serene expression and bearing contrast sharply with Christ’s animated, twisting pose.

The composition of this painting, which is a relatively late work by the Genoese painter Castello, is constructed along diagonals. The sense of movement within the picture is echoed by the varying degrees of light flickering across the surface and by Castello’s characteristically lively handling of paint. The colouring is rich and intense – the vibrant red of the Virgin’s dress juxtaposed with the deep blue of her cloak – and Castello’s brushwork is spirited and free, especially in the white cloth on which Christ sits, with its folds highlighted with impastoed strokes.

The long-necked Virgin, with her graceful profile and elegant hands, calls to mind the female figures in Parmigianino’s work. The setting, with the base of a column in the background, is almost certainly inspired by the portraits Anthony van Dyck painted while in Castello’s native city of Genoa, during his extended stay in Italy in the 1620s.

A very closely related autograph variant of this composition is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. The overall design of the picture is extremely close, though it omits the column base and its handling of paint is much looser, giving the painting a much sketchier appearance overall.

This is one of two seventeenth-century Genoese paintings in the National Gallery – the other is Gioacchino Assereto’s The Angel appears to Hagar and Ishmael – which come from the collection of the great connoisseur of Italian Baroque painting, Sir Denis Mahon (1910–2011).