The Sleeping Christ Child

The Sleeping Christ Child, painted by Alonso Cano around 1652 and now at Kingston Lacy in Dorset, is among the most tender and formally perfect works of his late career. The subject — the sleeping Christ Child as prefigurement of his own death — was a popular devotional theme in Baroque Spain, inviting the viewer to contemplate the future Passion through the apparent innocence of infancy. The Christ Child sleeping on a cross, or beside one, makes explicit the connection between birth and sacrifice that underlies Christian theology. Cano, painting this in Granada where he had returned as cathedral architect, brings his sculptor's understanding of the child's body to bear on an image of concentrated simplicity. Kingston Lacy, the Bankes family estate in Dorset now held by the National Trust, assembled a remarkable collection of Spanish paintings, and this Cano is one of its finest examples.

The sleeping child's form is modelled with exceptional anatomical precision — the soft flesh, rounded limbs, and relaxed musculature of a sleeping infant are observed with the attention of a sculptor accustomed to modelling from life. The cross as attribute is rendered simply, without dramatic elaboration.