Madonna col Bambino tra san Girolamo e san Bernardino

Neroccio di Bartolomeo de' Landi was one of the most refined painters in Siena in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, trained alongside Francesco di Giorgio Martini under Vecchietta, and this Madonna with Saints Jerome and Bernardino from 1476 belongs to his mature period when his distinctively delicate, elongated figure style was fully formed. Neroccio's Madonnas have a quality of dreaming gentleness entirely his own: features slightly abstracted toward ideal beauty, a soft atmospheric quality in the modelling, and a characteristic palette of pale rose and dove grey that sets him apart from the more saturated colours of his Sienese contemporaries. Jerome and Bernardino — the penitent hermit-scholar and the popular Franciscan preacher — were among the most frequently invoked saints in fifteenth-century Italian devotion.

Neroccio's distinctive figure elongation — figures slightly taller and more slender than life — produces the characteristic grace of his altarpieces. The Madonna's features are idealised with particular attention to the line of the nose and the arched brows: Sienese idealization filtered through Vecchietta's monumental training. The palette is soft and cool: pale blues, greys, and pinks against a gold ground that Neroccio retained well into a period when Florentines had abandoned it.