Our Lady of the Sparrow

In this extraordinary painting, donated to the Museum by British historian and collector Denis Mahon, the artist now known as Guercino, one of the protagonists of seventeenth-century European painting, gives evidence of his artistic maturity, using all his skill to pass on a complex message in seemingly simple but actually very well-thought-out forms.

In this painting, which can be dated to around the years 1615-16, the figures of the Madonna and Child emerge from a dark background. The naked child sits on his mother's knees clasping her robe with one hand.

Both of them are looking toward a sparrow that the Virgin is holding on her index finger and that is tied by a thin golden thread to the child's left hand.

In representations of the Madonna with the Child, the presence of a little bird was not unusual. On the one hand, it refers to the widespread habit, during the medieval, of using little birds as children's playthings, and on the other hand, it has a very specific symbolic value.

According to Christian tradition, the sparrow is the symbol of man's unhappiness: the golden thread that binds him to Jesus prevents us from falling, thanks to the intercession of the Virgin, into the temptations of sin. Emanating from the scene is an atmosphere of affectionate tenderness, thanks to the sobriety of colours in shades of ochre, brown and dark red, and the soft light that gently brings the forms out of the shadows, to the point that the delicacy of the gestures, expressed with the greatest painterly skill, is in itself emotionally moving beyond any iconographic interpretation.