Maria and Child

Masaccio completed this Madonna and Child with the monumental gravity and spatial depth that revolutionized Renaissance painting. The Virgin holds her son with maternal tenderness, their forms solid and three-dimensional in a way unprecedented in earlier Italian art. Masaccio died at just 27 but changed painting forever.

This work demonstrates Masaccio's use of perspective and naturalistic modeling, techniques that influenced every major Renaissance painter who followed. The painting hangs at the National Gallery in London.