The Madonna and Child, with the Dove of the Holy Spirit in the lunette

The half-length Virgin paired with a standing, blessing Christ Child belongs to a compositional type widely diffused in southern Umbria and Lazio in the later fifteenth century. Its earliest articulations are associated with Piermatteo d'Amelia (c. 1445–1503⁄8), in whose work of the 1470s and 1480s the design takes recognizable form, notably in his Franciscan triptych of 1485 in the Pinacoteca Comunale at Terni and in a related panel in the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence (F. Todini, op. cit., II, pls. 1073, 1075 and 1076). The composition was subsequently absorbed into the Pinturicchian milieu and is reflected, among other works, in the Madonna and Child in the Denver Art Museum, attributed to Andrea d'Aloigi d'Assisi, called l'Ingegno, and earlier associated with Pinturicchio (ibid., pl. 1187). The present panel by Francesco Melanzio is slightly later in date; the simplification of the model, the restrained linearism of the drapery and the austere cast of the Virgin's features place it in the first decade of the sixteenth century.

The son of Andrea di Miluccio, Melanzio was a principal painter active at Montefalco in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Probably formed in the Folignate orbit of Niccolò di Liberatore, called l'Alunno, he turned progressively to the example of Perugino and, above all, of Pinturicchio, whom he is thought to have assisted on the latter's Roman commissions at Santa Maria del Popolo and in the Borgia Apartment at the Vatican (E. Capparelli, 'Melanzio, Francesco', Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, LXXIII, Rome, 2009).