Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels

Luca Signorelli

National Gallery of Art

A young woman sitting and holding a nude baby boy is surrounded by winged angels and four men in this vertical painting. They all have pale skin, and the people, not angels, have delicate gold rings as halos. The woman, Mary, sits on a white stone pedestal on a stone step, which spans the width of the painting. Her head tilts to our right as she looks down. Her brown hair is covered with a translucent white veil. She wears a raspberry-pink dress under a midnight-blue cloak lined with pine green. She cradles the chubby baby with both hands. He has round cheeks, a snub nose, and bow-shaped lips. He looks at Mary and reaches toward her face with one hand. Two men stand on the step to either side of her pedestal, and two more kneel at the base of the step. The man at the top left is cleanshaven and has wings striped with grass green, mauve pink, pearl white, and sky blue. He wears a gold helmet, a muscled breastplate, a knee-length, lavender-blue tunic, and gold, shin-high, toe-less shoes. He holds a sword up high with one hand and a scale with the other. A tiny man kneels and prays to Mary in the higher pan of the scale. In front of him, a man with darker, tanned skin, kneels on one leg with his body facing us as he turns his head to look up at Mary and the baby. His brows are furrowed and his lips parted. He has short, curly brown hair and a trimmed beard. He wears a bottle-green robe and a canary-yellow cloak. He holds a piece of paper on a pink book braced against his raised knee. To the upper right, the man standing next to Mary’s pedestal has a long white beard, and he looks down at an open book he holds with both hands. He wears a conical, split hat, a grass-green robe edged with a pattern of haloed, winged baby heads against maroon red. He wears gold rings over white gloves and a white garment underneath the cloak. In front of him, a balding man with a curly white beard and hair also kneels on one leg in front of the step. This man also looks down with lips parted. He holds a book with a moss-green cover with one hand and a pen in the other as he writes on a piece of paper on the book. He wears a cranberry-red cloak over a lapis-blue robe, and both kneeling men wear sandals on the feet we can see. Four winged angels, about half the size of the other people, hover in a line behind Mary, two to each side. They all have long, blond, curly hair. Their wings and robes are painted in shades of red, yellow, blue, and green. The angel to our left holds a spray of white flowers and one to our right holds a branch of white lilies. They all look at Mary or the baby. A sliver of blue, mountainous landscape is visible to our left of the pedestal. The horizon comes about halfway up the composition, so Mary, the angels, and the men standing to each side of the pedestal are mostly outlined against a pale blue sky.