Madonna and Child

This panel is a fine example of late 15th-century Milanese painting. While grounded in the ornamental style that had dominated the school before the arrival of Leonardo, and conditioned by early Netherlandish painting, it incorporates the geometric order that the most ambitious local painters were deducing from his art. In a major study, William Suida described it as an early work by Bramantino, the most cerebral and rigorous exponent of this kind of synthesis. It is much more likely by a master who also absorbed the charming, anecdotal style of another local, Ambrogio Bergognone, and anticipated the greatest native painter of the next generation, Bernardino Luini.