Mary adoring the Child with the young St John the Baptist

Mary Adoring the Child with the Young St John the Baptist, at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, depicts the kneeling Madonna before the recumbent Christ with the young John the Baptist—a format that triangulates the two great sacred children of Christianity, anticipating through their proximity the Passion that will unite them. Lorenzo di Credi painted this around 1480 during his early mature period, adapting a compositional type established by Filippo Lippi and developed by Botticelli and Leonardo. The Karlsruhe Kunsthalle holds an important collection of early Italian paintings acquired largely in the nineteenth century.

The three figures form a stable triangular group—the Christ Child recumbent at the base, the adoring Virgin above and to one side, the infant John at the other—within a landscape setting whose soft atmospheric recession is built with thin oil glazes. Lorenzo's characteristic precise handling of the figures contrasts pleasantly with the loosely suggested Tuscan landscape background.