Virgin and Child

The Master with the Parrot's Virgin and Child, painted around 1515 and now at the Harvard Art Museums, is another example of the devotional production associated with this anonymous northern European painter whose identity continues to elude art historians. The presence of a parrot — either held by the Virgin, perched nearby, or incorporated as a symbolic element — is the defining attribute of this painter's Marian images. The Harvard Art Museums hold important collections of European painting assembled through the university's long art historical tradition, and this panel is a representative example of the early sixteenth-century Netherlandish devotional type.

The Master's characteristic precision in rendering the parrot extends to the textile details of the Virgin's drapery and the Christ child's soft flesh. Compositional conventions follow Netherlandish norms for the intimate Madonna type, with the parrot adding a note of exotic ornament.