Madonna and Child with St Justus of Volterra and St Margaret of Antioch by Bastiano Mainardi

Madonna and Child with St Justus of Volterra and St Margaret of Antioch by Bastiano Mainardi (1507)

Hail, full of grace

The Virgin sits on a marble throne at the centre, facing straight out, with the Child on her knee. She wears red under a dark blue mantle lined with green; he sits on a pink cloth, holding a small round fruit and looking down. The throne is a piece of Renaissance architecture in pale stone, with a shell in its arched canopy, red panels and pilasters. On its base, in clear Roman capitals, are the angel's first words to Mary: AVE GRATIA PLENA, "Hail, full of grace". The step below carries the inscription A S M CCCCCVII, with the date 1507.

The Newfields gallery label calls the arrangement perfectly balanced: the Virgin framed by the throne, a standing saint on either side, and her frontal pose and outward gaze captioned by the words of the prayer. Behind the figures a low landscape of green hills and water, with a few slender trees, runs to a pale sky.

Two saints

On the left stands a bishop in a white mitre and a red cope over blue, wearing red gloves, with a tall crozier in one hand and round loaves of bread in the crook of his other arm. This is Justus of Volterra, one of the patron saints of that Tuscan town. According to his legend, when the Ostrogothic king Totila besieged Volterra, Justus had all the bread in the city gathered up and lowered from the walls in baskets to the enemy, who were so disconcerted that they abandoned the siege. The people then proclaimed him bishop.

On the right is Margaret of Antioch, a young woman in blue with a gold mantle lined with pink, holding a small cross and, with a red book, a palm. In her story she refused to renounce her faith or to marry a Roman governor, was swallowed by Satan in the form of a dragon and escaped when the cross she carried irritated its insides, and was then beheaded. Mainardi leaves the dragon out and gives her only the cross.

Mainardi's late style

Sebastiano, or Bastiano, Mainardi was born in San Gimignano in 1466 and trained in the late 1470s in the Florentine workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, who became his brother-in-law. The museum describes his conservative style, derived from Ghirlandaio's, as sober in form, clear in its iconography and symmetrical in composition, and regards this signed and dated altarpiece as a major work of his late period. He died in 1513. Many of his altarpieces were painted for churches in and around San Gimignano; the museum does not record where this one first stood.

From Indianapolis

The panel is painted in oil and is large, 63½ by 61 inches (about 161 by 155 centimetres), almost square. It belonged to Susanah Tarkington, the widow of Booth Tarkington, who gave it in 1951 in memory of her husband to the John Herron Art Institute, now the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields (accession number 51.58).

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole panel, in its nearly square format, with the inscription and date on the steps of the throne.

Sources: Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, 51.58 · Wikimedia Commons · Wikidata Q27898351 · Wikipedia (Italian), "Giusto e Clemente" · Wikipedia, "Margaret the Virgin", "Bastiano Mainardi"