Maria with the Sleeping Child

Baldung's Maria with the Sleeping Child from 1540 is one of his last paintings, demonstrating his continued engagement with Marian devotional subjects in the final decade of his life when the Reformation had transformed the religious landscape of Strasbourg. The sleeping Christ Child in Mary's arms carries Eucharistic symbolism—the sleep prefiguring death, the maternal tender care prefiguring the Pietà—that gives the apparently intimate domestic subject a layer of theological depth appropriate to a mature painter's meditation on the devotional tradition of his entire career. Baldung's late works show no diminution of technical mastery or spiritual seriousness, and this Maria belongs to a group of late devotional paintings that demonstrate his continued engagement with Catholic imagery even in a Lutheran-dominated Strasbourg.

The late painting demonstrates Baldung's refined mature style, with the quiet scene rendered in gentler tones than his more dramatically expressive works.