Vierge à l'Enfant et saint Antoine abbé dans un paysage

Ludovico Mazzolino's Virgin and Child with Saint Anthony Abbot in a Landscape combines his characteristic small format and dense compositional approach with an outdoor setting unusual for his more frequent interior architectural backgrounds. Saint Anthony Abbot, the desert father whose temptations established the archetype of monastic spiritual warfare, sits with his identifying pig and bell alongside the sacred grouping of mother and child. Mazzolino's brilliant colors and the fantastical landscape with its distinctive rock formations and distant vistas give the intimate devotional image an otherworldly quality consistent with his idiosyncratic approach to the entire painting tradition.

The devotional composition is rendered with attention to the expressive and contemplative qualities that served the painting's function as an aid to prayer and meditation.