Madonna and Child with God the Father Blessing and Angels

The Virgin sits directly on the ground, eschewing the throne that is her right as Queen of Heaven. The Madonna of Humility, as this type of representation is called, appeared at the end of the Middle Ages as devotion to Mary took on a greater personal, human dimension. The infant’s reaching for her breast to nurse is a natural gesture—and layered with symbolism. At a time when all but the poorest families sent their children to wet nurses, his gesture reinforces the idea of Mary’s humility. Since milk was believed to be blood that had been converted in the mother’s body, the artist is evoking Jesus’s sacrifice and the sacrament of communion. And, because the Virgin was associated with the Church itself, the nursing allusion points further to the sustenance given to the faithful by the Church, emphasized by Mary’s large, sheltering body.

Jacopo di Cione (Florentine, c. 1340 - c. 1400?) made a strong effort to create depth and to replicate the physical world in many areas of this painting. The gradual darkening of the multicolored marble floor subtly accentuates its extension into depth, a spatial effect sometimes called “pseudo-perspective.” In particular, the foreshortened prayer book and the undulating lower hem of the Virgin’s mantle are painted with a deliberate illusionism: they project beyond the front edge of the floor, and seem to extend into the real space of the spectator.

The Madonna of Humility was an especially popular subject in 14th-century Florence, and this painting seems to have been a model for several others—which suggests that Jacopo’s painting originally occupied a prominent place in the city. Jacopo was the younger brother of two painters, Andrea (called Orcagna) and Nardo di Cione (Florentine, active from c. 1340; died 1365/1366), who were regarded by contemporaries as the best in Florence. The National Gallery of Art also owns a small, jewel-like altarpiece by Nardo, _Madonna and Child, with Saints Peter and John the Evangelist, and Man of Sorrows [entire triptych]_, who named Jacopo as his heir.