Madonna adoring the Child between Saints Monica and Mary Magdalene

Against the background of a typical Vicenza landscape (in the distance we can see the city wall of Vicenza with the church of San Bartolomeo), harsh and rocky, lying under a sky of heavy clouds, stand three female figures in absorbed and silent contemplation of the Child. In the foreground, on the left, is Saint Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine. Her face, with strongly detailed features, has been identified as the portrait of Piera Porto, the widow of Bernardino Pagello, who is believed to have commissioned the altar-piece around 1486 in memory of her late husband. Her fixed empty gaze, her austere expression and the scroll that she holds in her hands, containing a quotation from the Ninth Book of the Confessions of Saint Augustine: NULLA RE IAM DELECTOR IN HAC VITA (“I have no further delight in any thing in this life”), together with the cross, indicate her state of virtuous widowhood. On the right, Magdalene, swathed in sumptuous and elegant draperies, holds the vase containing the ointment with which she will bathe Christ’s feet and head. Higher up the Madonna, kneeling under a slender canopy of laurel branches, contemplates her Son lying on the ground with his genitals in full view, a sign of his humanity and of his future suffering.

The entire work, which comes from the first chapel on the right in the destroyed church of San Bartolomeo, is full of symbolic elements linked with the theme of incarnation, death and resurrection: the root at the level of the Child’s head is the symbol of Christ incarnate, the cherries that he holds in his fingers and the red cloth covering the canopy allude to the blood of the Passion, the black drape behind the Madonna expresses the grief of the Mother on the death of her Son, the verdant olive tree on the left contrasting with the dry one on the right refers to Christ’s resurrection.