Madonna of Humility

The Queen of Heaven sits not on a throne but on a cushion on the ground, and her child presses his forehead to her cheek. Angels make music beside them.

The story behind the painting

This Madonna of Humility is a tempera painting on wood by Fra Angelico, executed in 1433-1435; Wikidata gives 1433. Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar who had joined the order around 1423, and by 1436 he had moved from the convent at Fiesole to the new convent of San Marco in Florence. The panel has been identified as the one Giorgio Vasari described in 1568 in the home of the Gondi family in Florence, where it formed part of a polyptych. It belongs to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid and is on loan to the National Art Museum of Catalonia.

What to look for

The Virgin sits on a cushion placed directly on the ground, the Child standing on her lap. In her left hand she holds a vase of roses and a lily. The Child also holds a lily and rests his forehead against his mother's cheek. Behind them, three angels hold up a cloth of honour of gold and black embroidered brocade, while two more angels sit on the ground playing an organ and a lute. The panel is about 147 by 91 cm.

Meaning and intent

The title names the idea: humility. Instead of an elevated throne, Mary sits low, on the earth itself, yet she is still honoured by a brocade cloth and attended by angels. The flowers carry meaning too: the roses and lily are symbols of motherhood and purity. The tender gesture of the Child, forehead to cheek, makes the sacred image intimate, a mother and child close together amid heavenly music. Lowliness and glory meet in a single image.

Legacy

According to the source, the monumental figures, the splendour of the clothes, the modulated light and the use of blue place this panel in the purest fifteenth-century Italian style. Fra Angelico's painting of these years combined emerging Renaissance ideas with Gothic elements, and he worked with costly pigments. Once part of a larger polyptych in a Florentine home, the panel now hangs in Barcelona, where visitors can still hear, in paint, the quiet music of its angels.