Madonna and Child with Saints, Angels and Federico da Montefeltro (San Bernardino Altarpiece)

Piero della Francesca's Sacra Conversazione, also known as the Brera Altarpiece, shows the Virgin enthroned with the sleeping Christ Child on her lap, surrounded by angels and saints, including Saint Francis, Saint Bernardino of Siena, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome. On the right, in profile and in armour, kneels Duke Federico da Montefeltro, the patron, silent and present within the sacred scene. The work was commissioned for the Franciscan church of San Donato in Urbino, where the duke was at one point buried, and it was probably finished around 1475. The architecture, a church apse with a scallop shell from which an ostrich egg hangs, is built with precise perspective whose vanishing point falls at the Virgin's mouth, and its restrained monochrome recalls the buildings of Leon Battista Alberti. The egg and the shell above it allow several symbolic readings, such as life, birth or fertility, and also point to the patron's family. The painting stands out for its meticulous rendering of armour, jewels and fabrics, a debt to Flemish painting, and for its use of light to give volume to the figures.

Painter

Piero della Francesca

Date

1472

Medium

tempera, oil paint, panel

Dimensions

248 × 170 cm

Museum

Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Movement

Early Renaissance

Genre

donor portrait, religious art

Depicts

Peter of Verona, boy, Bernardino of Siena, John the Evangelist, Mary, John the Baptist, Andrew the Apostle, Federico da Montefeltro

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