The Madonna and Child

Sano di Pietro was the most consistently productive Sienese master of the mid-fifteenth century, faithful to local tradition yet undeniably very influential on painters of the following generation, many of whom were inspired by his example. The intimate relationship between Madonna and Child in this panel owes much to earlier precedent and is paralleled in other devotional panels by the artist, including, for example, the Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome and Bernardino and four Angels (Berenson, op. cit., II, pl. 581), in which the Child's feet are disposed in a slightly different way, his right hand not shown and that of the Madonna moved. Denys Sutton's dating to after 1450 is followed in the 1965 catalogue by St. John Gore, who compares the picture with the Madonna of the same format, still in its original frame, in the Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (J. Pope Hennessy, The Robert Lehman Collection, I, Italian Paintings, New York and Princeton, 1987, no. 63): the present panel is undoubtedly the finer in quality.