The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist

The grouping of the Virgin and Child with the infant Saint John the Baptist — the future precursor of Christ — was a subject with particular currency in Renaissance and post-Renaissance devotional painting, largely owing to its promotion by Florentine artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Morales's treatment, dated around 1570 and in the Prado, adapts this originally Florentine subject to his Iberian Mannerist idiom, combining the intimacy of the Madonna-and-Child format with the additional presence of John as a prefiguration of the Baptist's later relationship to Christ. The two children's meeting — which appears in the Gospel of Luke as a prenatal event, when Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth and the unborn John leaps in the womb — was frequently depicted as a tender childhood encounter that nonetheless carried prophetic weight: these two children would meet again at the Jordan. Morales handles the subject with his characteristic emotional concentration, the three figures pressed into a pyramidal group.

The three-figure group requires Morales to balance the compositional demands of two children and an adult within his preferred close-focus format. He achieves this through tight overlapping that creates a pyramid of forms, each figure's gaze and gesture contributing to the emotional exchange. The smooth enamel surface unifies all three figures' skin tones despite the different ages and roles represented.