Madonna and Child with the Young St. John the Baptist

Madonna and Child with the Young St. John the Baptist by Biagio d'Antonio, dated around 1480 and now in Baltimore's Walters Art Museum, belongs to the large category of Florentine devotional Madonnas that he produced throughout his career. The Walters Art Museum, founded by the collecting of William and Henry Walters, assembled one of America's finest collections of medieval and Renaissance art including significant Italian panel paintings. This work's inclusion in the Walters collection places it among quality examples of the type; Biagio d'Antonio's devotional panels were collected by major American institutions in the early twentieth century as representative examples of Early Renaissance Florentine painting.

Tempera on panel with the tondo or rectangular format standard for domestic devotional Madonnas. The three-figure composition — Virgin, Christ child, and young Baptist — required careful management of the infants' physical relationship: typically the young Baptist gestures toward or kneels before the Christ child in anticipatory reverence.