The Madonna and Child

This intimately-sized panel is of the iconographic tradition known as the Hodegetria, or 'she who shows the way', in which the Madonna gestures towards her son who will show mankind the path to salvation. Associated with a lost Byzantine icon thought to have been painted from life by Saint Luke himself, this format usually shows the Madonna presenting her son to the viewer in a formal manner: the Chirst Child, often slightly off to the right of the composition, is shown as a miniature adult in the guise of a teacher or ancient philosopher, dressed in a toga, holding a scroll, and often blessing the viewer with his empty hand. Here, however, the Madonna does not offer her son to the viewer but cradles him lovingly, caressing his cheek with her own as he leans into her embrace and turns the scroll in both hands, treating it almost as a plaything. The special warmth and affection of this image identifies it as a subset of the Hodegetria known as the Madonna of Eleousa, or Madonna of Tenderness. The Elousa type, as evident in this poignant image, is characterized by a gentleness and emotional verity which announced the new humanism that would galvanize the developments in Western art we now think of as the Renaissance.