If you’ve seen one Madonna and Child, you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all.

The Christ child depicted with the Virgin Mary is one of the foundational images of Western art and has developed a long visual tradition. Because everyone was pretty much only painting pictures of Jesus, artists had to figure out ways to make their paintings stand out from all the others. As one of the forerunners of Italian Renaissance painting, Andrea Mantegna was early to this party.

Growing up near Padua, Mantegna couldn’t escape the influence of master sculptor Donatello, who lived and worked there for a decade starting in 1443. It wasn’t long before Mantegna developed a bulky, sculptural painting style. This unique style helped Mantegna to develop volumetric forms and lent his work a heightened sense of illusion, which he also played up with tricks. Here, he sets the figures within what looks like a painted niche in a marble archway. Mantenga also cleverly set a cloth over the baby’s legs to make them seem as though they are receding into the picture plane. 

Mantegna also added red seraphim and lavender cherubim, two kinds of Biblical angels, to this image. Although you may have never heard of them, seraphim were pervasive in Medieval Christian theology, and they appeared in the work of other artists. For instance, Giotto painted an image of Saint Francis experiencing a vision of a seraph. Seraphim first appeared in the Torah and then in the Bible. In the Christian ranking of types of angels, a practice called angelology, seraphim are the highest-ranked angels. Judaism must be hardcore because seraphim only rank fifth in the ten types of Hebrew angels. 

Although the figures on the right look cute and cuddly, the Bible describes cherubim as winged beings with four different faces: a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. Despite their more menacing beginnings, cherubs in Western Medieval art quickly became associated with 'putti', or the cute, chubby babies with wings that we see in this painting.

If you can direct your attention away from the creepy babies that comprise the background, you’ll notice that the faces of Christ and the Virgin Mary are pretty jacked up. This isn’t entirely Mantegna’s fault. The painting had suffered damage and years of bad reconstructions when the Met bought it from Michael Friedsam, a New York philanthropist and former president of the B. Altman and Company department store, in 1931. Mantegnas weren’t the only great works that Friedsam had. By the time he died, he had amassed a pretty serious art collection, including works by Vermeer, van Eyck, and more. He ended up donating his collection, splitting it between the Met and the Brooklyn Museum.

However, Brooklyn Museum curators don’t exactly want some of Friedsam’s works anymore. Although there are some excellent pieces in the collection, others are either not of museum quality or are outright forgeries. But, because of the wording of the contract that dictated this large bequest, curators are having a hard time getting rid of the unwanted pieces.