Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate
Lorenzo di Credi, 1477
This small oil on panel shows the Virgin and Child in an interior opening onto a distant landscape, with a window revealing fields and a clear sky. The pomegranate the child plays with gives the painting its alternative name, the Madonna of the Pomegranate. In many traditions the fruit symbolizes Christ's Passion and resurrection, but here it appears as a tender, everyday detail. The subtle halo and the Virgin's quiet, inward gaze balance the scene between devotion and intimacy.
Its authorship remains unresolved. Leonardo da Vinci, Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi have all been proposed, and the debate centres on the child's anatomy, which some specialists find too clumsy for the hand of the Florentine master. Those who favour an attribution to Leonardo see the work as an early piece from his youth. Because of its modest size and its careful landscape and light, the painting is now studied as an example of Florentine workshop practice in the later fifteenth century and of the debates over style it has provoked.
- Painter
- Lorenzo di Credi
- Date
- 1477
- Medium
- oil paint, panel
- Dimensions
- 16 × 13 cm
- Museum
- Samuel H. Kress Collection
- Movement
- Italian Renaissance
- Genre
- religious art
- Depicts
- landscape, nudity, Mary, window, aureola, Christ Child
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