Madonna and Child

Madonna and Child, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, is one of the many devotional panels by Lorenzo di Credi that satisfied Florentine demand for intimate sacred images during the last decade of the fifteenth century. The Strasbourg museum's Italian collection, assembled through the city's long connections to both France and Germany, preserves several panels of this type that document the export of Florentine workshop production to northern European collections. Lorenzo's careful technique and conventional piety made his Madonnas reliable commodities in the devotional market.

The Madonna and Child are presented in the standard three-quarter bust format against either a dark ground or a landscape glimpsed through a window, the figures modeled with Lorenzo's characteristic smooth oil application. The Child's pose and Mary's answering expression are selected from the repertoire of gestures that Florentine workshops had developed over decades of devotional production.