Vierge à l'Enfant tenant une grenade

Vierge à l'Enfant tenant une grenade, at the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio, depicts the Madonna holding a pomegranate—a fruit whose many seeds made it a symbol of the church's unity and, because of its red interior, of Christ's Passion and the Eucharistic blood. Lorenzo di Credi's panel for the Fesch collection—assembled by Napoleon's uncle Cardinal Fesch—demonstrates the wide distribution of Florentine workshop panels across European collections. The pomegranate's symbolic weight adds iconographic depth to an otherwise conventional devotional format.

The Virgin presents the pomegranate to the Christ Child with a gesture that draws the viewer's eye to the symbolic object while maintaining the intimate character of a mother-child interaction. Lorenzo renders the pomegranate's distinctive skin texture—leathery and slightly dimpled—with the material specificity he brings to all symbolic objects placed in his compositions.