Madonna Adoring the Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and an Angel

Madonna Adoring the Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and an Angel, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shows Lorenzo di Credi's characteristic treatment of a devotional subject that combined the two most popular sacred children of Florentine piety—the Christ Child and the infant John the Baptist—in a pastoral setting. The Madonna's adoring posture—kneeling before the recumbent Child—was established by Fra Filippo Lippi and carried forward through Botticelli and Leonardo, each adding their own variation to a format fundamental to Florentine devotional painting.

The composition is built around the diagonal axis of the recumbent Child and the kneeling Madonna, the infant John and the angel providing secondary figures that complete the triangular group. Lorenzo's oil technique allows him to build the landscape setting—a soft Tuscan countryside—with the atmospheric recession he learned from Leonardo's example.