Madonna with child

Fra Bartolomeo painted this Madonna with Child around 1509 for the Basilica of Saint Mark in Florence, the Dominican church where he served as a friar — one of his institutional commissions for the order that shaped his entire artistic and spiritual life. Santa Maria del Fiore's baptistery, where Florentines were baptized under the Baptist's patronage, and San Marco, where Fra Bartolomeo lived and painted, represented the twin poles of his Florentine devotional world. His Madonnas of the mature period combine the monumentality developed through his Roman study with the intimacy of the devotional tradition he had inherited from Florentine predecessors. By 1509 his friendship with Raphael had produced one of the most significant artistic exchanges of the High Renaissance.

Oil on panel with Fra Bartolomeo's characteristic soft atmospheric modeling and monumental figure treatment. The work demonstrates the artistic qualities characteristic of Fra Bartolomeo's mature period.