Madonna And Child Duccio

One of the last known paintings by Italian Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna is titled Madonna and Child. Also commonly referred to as the Stroganoff Madonna or Stoclet Madonna (from its two previous owners), it depicts the Virgin Mary holding Christ. The painting is currently on display by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York. According to Carol Vogel in her article “The Met Makes Its Biggest Purchase Ever,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid between “$45 million to $50 million” for Madonna and Child. Despite its whopping price tag, the painting is “one of the few that Duccio created as individual works of art and was never part of a larger assemblage,” (Carol Vogel, 2004), making it one of a kind. In Madonna and Child,
The egg tempera technique binds colored pigments with egg yolk. Not only is the background of Madonna and Child richly executed in egg tempera and gold but parts of the Virgin Mary’s drapery as well. Egg tempera is an old painting method used in the Byzantine Empire. While the composition of art revolutionizes over a period of time, Duccio remained intact with Byzantine tradition in his paintings.
Duccio di Buoninsegna created Madonna and Child (ca. 1300) during an era when Sienese painting became popular. As the founder of Sienese painting, Duccio placed high importance on naturalism. He wanted to show people and things as they actually are. In Madonna and Child, Duccio relaxed the rigidity and frontality of the figures, softened the drapery, and illustrated the affection between mother and child contrasting such artists as Da Vinci. In other representations of Madonna with her child Jesus, Duccio infuses Byzantine art with a new expression of feeling in art to create a lifelike
Not very often do you encounter paintings like the size of a piece of paper. As mentioned before, Madonna and Child was never part of a larger assemblage. It is one of those personal paintings that was hung up and devoted to by various followers. Two burns located on the bottom edge of the frame testify the use of candles which would have sat beneath.
Standing in front of the Virgin Mary and Christ is known as a parapet. A parapet is a low, protective wall along the edge of a balcony, roof, or bastion (Kleiner, 565). Duccio added the illusionistic device as a trick to create more depth. He wanted to connect the “fictive, sacred world of the painting with the temporal one of the viewer” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). The symmetrical linear pattern of the parapet contrasts with the asymmetrical design of the painting. The parapet in Madonna and Child acts like a barrier to separate the contents of the picture from the rest of the