Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John

Attributed to Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina

National Gallery of Art

A woman and two small children, all with pale skin, sit on a rocky ledge in front of a hilly landscape in this vertical painting. The woman, to our right, holds one child on her lap and that child reaches to embrace the second child kneeling next to the woman, to our left. The woman, Mary, sits with her knees angled slightly to our right. She turns her face toward the child in her lap, to our left, but looks with shadowed eyes down in front of her. She has a long, delicate nose, rose-blushed cheeks, and her pale lips curl gently in a smile. Golden brown hair is parted down the middle over a high forehead, which is covered with a transparent veil that comes nearly to her faint eyebrows. A maroon-red hood covers her head and drapes across her shoulders under a slate-blue robe. Near one arm, the hem of the robe is turned back to reveal scarlet-red lining. She holds her left hand, to our right, slightly up with her palm facing us. Her other arm wraps around the nude child in her lap and rests against his hip. This child, Jesus, has a snub nose, rounded cheeks, and a pudgy body. He reaches to our left so his body is angled in that direction, but he turns his head back to look into the distance with pale brown eyes. To our left, the second child, Saint John, kneels and touches Jesus’s chest with one hand as he looks up and smiles at Mary. Saint John wears a ruby-red tunic tied at his right shoulder and a striped, wine-red sash around his waist is tied at his back. Both boys have reddish-blond curly hair, rosy cheeks, and are barefoot. Plants and flowers grow on the rocky ledge where they sit. To our left, beyond the trio, golden hills lead up to a ghostly gray castle on the highest peak. Closer to us but tiny in scale in the background, a person runs toward a man sitting on a rock and drinking out of a jug. A shallow waterfall emerges from the rocky base of the hill closest to us, just over John’s shoulder. The hills descend sharply to a river winding into the distance to our right, over Mary’s shoulder. Two white birds swim in the river near an arched bridge spanning the waterway. The river winds back to pale blue mountains along the horizon, which comes about two-thirds of the way up this painting. A few more people walk along paths and cross the bridge in the background. A few thin, white clouds float across the pale blue sky above.