Virgin with the Yarn Winder

The Virgin with the Yarn Winder — closely related to the iconographic type represented by the Prado's Virgin and Child with a Spindle — depicts Mary engaged in the domestic labour of winding wool while the Christ Child reaches for or contemplates the implement that symbolically prefigures the cross. This version, dated 1568 and in the Hispanic Society collection, is one of the finest examples of Morales's ability to invest apparently domestic imagery with profound devotional meaning. The yarn-winder type had roots in Leonardo da Vinci's two celebrated treatments of the subject, both dating from around 1501, and Morales's Iberian version participates in the broader European meditation on the childhood of Christ as a time of unconscious or semi-conscious engagement with the destiny that awaits him. The Hispanic Society's holding of this work, alongside Morales's Holy Family of 1557, demonstrates how thoroughly his devotional production circulated to American collections through the Spanish art market.

Morales's panel surface here achieves a refinement characteristic of his mature middle period: the flesh of both mother and child built up through careful glazes to a warm inner luminosity, the yarn-winder itself rendered with the precise tactile quality of a small symbolic object. The compositional asymmetry created by the winder animates what might otherwise be a static devotional group.