This is one of Morales’s most characteristic and best-known paintings, both because of its technical quality, its domestic format and its apparently tender and heartwarming subject, and also because it is one of the works by the painter that have been exhibited continuously ever since first entering the Prado. It joined the Museum’s holdings in 1916 after the Royal Board of Trustees had accepted the extraordinary artistic legacy of one of its most active and generous members, Pablo Bosch y Barrau (1862-1915), a financier and collector from Barcelona. Bosch had acquired the panel from the heirs of a deacon of Ávila, and when it was hung at the Madrid home of the Catalan financier, it drew attention with its delicacy and quality.

We know nothing of the painting’s original provenance, but it is a carefully executed piece, and is thought to have been commissioned by some personage of note who wanted one of Morales’s most frequently repeated compositions, a fact indicated by the large number of known versions. Most of these are in a smaller format centred on the half-length figures of Mary and the Christ Child. This version, on the other hand, shows a more developed three-quarter Virgin, who appears seated with the Child in her arms. She contemplates him in self-absorption, her head inclined to her right, where the Child, his back to the viewer, raises his head in his turn towards his mother, searching for her breast with his hand after using the other to lift part of the thin veil she wears. The child’s moving legs emphasise his restlessness in contrast with the repose of the protecting mother, whose large hands are spread over the cloth in which Jesus’s body is wrapped.

Jesus’s hand, which has found its way inside Mary’s crimson dress, turns the scene into a powerful image of a subject, the Nursing Madonna, with a long tradition in Christian art. As Louis Réau pointed out, this iconography had an extremely varied and nuanced development which began in Byzantine painting and spread far and wide during the Middle Ages. There were many examples in western art of the image of Mary suckling the Child or exhibiting a bare breast, though it progressively disappeared in the course of the sixteenth century because it became considered indecorous or unsuitable.

The idea for the composition is an adaptation of the seated Virgins that Morales himself established in his most resourceful works, beginning with the Virgin and Child with the Little Bird at the parish church of San Agustín in Madrid, dated 1546, and including above all the Virgin and Child with the Infant St John in Salamanca and the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist in Valencia de Alcántara. Seated in the foreground, the Virgin is arranged pyramidally, with one of her knees thrust forward and her head slightly inclined. The Museu de Arte Antiga in Lisbon holds a copy that is almost identical to the Prado’s with the exception of the Virgin’s tunic, which is of a different hue of deep red. It is possible that they both issued from the same model. In fact, Gaya Nuño considered the Prado panel to be an enlargement of the smaller versions. For stylistic reasons, the central group, among which we include this work, must date from about 1560-65 (Text drawn from Ruiz, L.: The Divine Morales, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2015, pp. 96-98).