Virgin Adoring the Christ Child with St. John the Baptist and Two Angels

Tommaso Lunetti's Virgin Adoring the Christ Child with St. John the Baptist and Two Angels, painted around 1510 and now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, belongs to the tradition of the kneeling Madonna adoring the child — the devotional type associated with Franciscan spirituality and Saint Bridget's vision of the Nativity — expanded with the young John the Baptist and attending angels. Lunetti, a Florentine painter working in the tradition of Cosimo Rosselli and the late Ghirlandaio circle, produced devotional panels of standard Florentine workshop quality for the market for intimate religious images. The LACMA holding documents the wide dispersal of Florentine workshop production across the Atlantic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The composition organizes the kneeling Virgin, the reclining infant Christ, and the flanking figures of John and the angels in the stable pyramid format of late Florentine workshop practice. The palette is warm with the standard blue-and-red for the Virgin. Figure modeling is soft and idealized.