
Read the visual description
A man standing to our right with his hands together in prayer faces a woman holding a baby to our left in this vertical painting. All the people have pale skin. In the lower right quadrant of the painting, the man is shown from the chest up and is angled away from us so his profile faces our left. He has short, wavy brown hair, a bumped nose, flushed cheeks, and a faint goatee. He wears a black jacket with crimson-red sleeves. The high white collar and cuff of the hand we can see is decorated with a scrolling pattern in black. Slightly smaller in scale, the woman to our left is shown from the knees up. She wears a cherry-red dress under a cream-white mantle draped around her head and shoulders. A gold-edged, robin’s egg-blue drapery with a forest-green underside wraps around her middle and falls from the area of her waist. She stands with her body facing us and her head tilted to our right toward the baby in her arms. She looks up and to our left with brown eyes. She has brown hair, a straight nose, and her small pink lips are closed. Her head is encircled with a gold line indicating a halo. The baby she holds leans his head against her shoulder and looks off to our left, also with brown eyes. He has rounded cheeks and a chubby chest and arms. His midsection is wrapped with a white cloth, and he holds a yellow and red apple with his right hand, on our left. With his other hand, he holds the woman’s pointer finger. The scene takes place near the corner of a room with parchment-white walls.
National Gallery of Art · Painting
A Gentleman in Adoration before the Madonna
Giovanni Battista Moroni
- Date
- c. 1560
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- overall: 59.7 × 64.8 cm (23 1/2 × 25 1/2 in.) framed: 80.01 × 85.41 × 7.62 cm (31 1/2 × 33 5/8 × 3 in.)
- Classification
- Painting
- Accession number
- 1939.1.114
- Credit line
- Samuel H. Kress Collection
- Time span
- 1551 to 1600
- Department
- CIS-R
Subjects and terms
- painted surface
- Madonna and Child
- religious
- Renaissance
- Italian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century
- Gentleman
- Bergamo
Provenance
Possibly Generale Conte Teodoro Lechi [1778-1866], Brescia, Italy.[1] Casa Grimani, Venice. (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Florence and Rome); sold 1932 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[2] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] Recorded as item 274 the inventory of the Lechi family, published by Fausto Lechi, _I quadri delle collezioni Lechi in Brescia_, Florence, 1968: 204. [2] According to Kress records in NGA curatorial files. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/44.
NGA object ID 255. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.