Possibly by Sodoma, The Madonna and Child

In a remote landscape, the Virgin, dressed in modest robes, holds the infant Christ and offers him milk. The baby turns away from her breast and smiles at us, his palm resting on the back of his mother’s hand. As in Boltraffio’s The Virgin and Child, the infant Christ pauses from suckling to acknowledge the worshipping viewer.

Images of the Virgin breastfeeding are known as ‘Virgo Lactans’ (or Madonna del Latte in Italian), and became popular during the Middle Ages as part of the increasing cult of and devotion to the Virgin Mary. The nursing Virgin is often shown seated humbly on the ground, as the ‘Madonna of Humility’, because during the Middle Ages women of any means usually did not breastfeed their own babies, but employed wet nurses to feed them. The Virgin’s milk was regarded as a sign of her own devotion and sacrifice, symbolically connected to the blood of Christ.

Paintings of the Virgin breastfeeding became particularly popular in Tuscany from the fourteenth century onward and it is likely that this painting was made in the region in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The so-called Madonna Litta, historically attributed to Leonardo, but surely a studio work overseen by him and painted between 1491 and 1495 (now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg), was a particularly celebrated composition which influenced the many versions, such as Boltraffio’s, that appeared in the years following its creation. After the Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563, which sought to reform the Catholic Church in response to the Protestant Reformation, nudity in religious art was discouraged and such images of the Virgin were less frequently commissioned.

The picture is badly disfigured by old varnish, which has darkened, yellowing the flesh tones and making it hard to distinguish the painting’s true colours. The lighter strip at the top of the panel, through which the Virgin’s halo passes, is an unusual element probably relating to how the painting was previously framed, but the precise reason for its existence is not known. We are not certain that this painting is by Sodoma but another version (Richter Collection, London), similar in design, is attributed to him.