Madonna of the Green Cushion

Andrea Solari's Madonna of the Green Cushion from around 1507 is among the most beloved devotional paintings of the Milanese Leonardo school, the Christ child sleeping on a green cushion as the Virgin contemplates him in what devotional tradition understood as a foreknowing of his eventual suffering and death. Solari had trained in Leonardo's Milan workshop and developed a personal manner of considerable warmth and technical refinement, his surfaces combining Leonardesque sfumato with a richness of color that owes something to his brother Cristoforo's Venetian contacts. The sleeping infant as meditation on mortality was a powerful devotional type — the vulnerability of the divine child prefiguring the sacrificial death — and Solari's version achieves its effect through the tenderness of the Virgin's gaze and the extraordinary softness of the child's sleeping form, among the most sensitively rendered in all Milanese painting.

The smooth sfumato modeling and soft atmospheric effects demonstrate Leonardo's influence on Solari, with the Madonna's gentle expression and the Child's naturalistic pose reflecting the master's approach to sacred intimacy.