Madonna and Child

Cosimo Tura's Madonna and Child from 1477, produced late in his tenure as Este court painter, carries the full weight of his developed mature style. By this date Tura had produced the Roverella Altarpiece fragments, the organ shutter paintings for Ferrara Cathedral, and numerous smaller devotional commissions, and the Madonna and Child type had been through his personal transformation into something wholly unlike the sweetly decorative Florentine version or the spiritually serene Venetian version. Tura's Madonnas are monumental, psychologically complex, and set within fantastical thrones that combine classical architectural vocabulary with decorative invention that owes nothing to any identifiable source. The Christ Child in Tura's hands is typically alert, adult-faced, and blessing — more the infant God than the vulnerable child.

The throne architecture in Tura's Madonnas is among the most idiosyncratic contributions in Italian painting: he combines classicizing pilasters and entablatures with decorative elements drawn from goldsmith work, manuscript illumination, and what appears to be pure imagination. The modelling of the Virgin's face shows his finest glazing technique: thin layers of warm flesh tone over an ochre ground with cooler greys in the deepest shadows. The Christ Child's gold-tipped hair is individually described with fine brush marks.