Shown from the lap up, a young woman sits facing us as she cradles a plump baby in her lap in this square painting. They both have pale, peachy skin and blond hair. They are softly lit from the upper left, and the background behind them is inky black. A sea-blue cloth drapes over the woman’s head and across her shoulders. Its top edge is rolled back slightly, revealing tendrils of long, wavy hair framing her face. A thin gold line creates a delicate halo around head. Her scarlet-red gown is gathered and belted high above the waist. A cobalt-blue mantle lined with pumpkin orange drapes down over her shoulders, the arm of her chair, and her lap. She tilts her head slightly to our left, and lowers her eyes to gaze at or toward the child. She holds his torso with her right hand, to our left, and rests her other hand across his ankles. The child wears a dove-gray tunic with rolled up sleeves. His short hair lies in flat swirls, and his chubby cheeks are tinged with pale pink. Clusters of short gold rays fan out from the top and sides of his head. He fingers the hem of his tunic with his left hand as he turns his upper body to his right, our left, to pluck a carnation with tan, spiky petals on a long, thin green stem with his other. This carnation and at least one other with a wine-red center is held in a wide, squat, cream-white vase decorated with fern-green scallops and leaves.

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   The Madonna of the Carnation, by Bernardino Luini, shows the Virgin with the Christ child seated in her lap as he turns to grasp a carnation growing in a pot nearby. This may seem like an everyday gesture, but during the Renaissance a carnation symbolized either the Crucifixion or the Virgin\u0092s pure love. Thus the painting suggests that Christ, even as an infant, embraced his future sacrifice on the cross, while his mother\u0092s pensive expression implies her comprehension of what his action signifies.

   Though not as well known today, Luini was once considered the leading painter from the Lombardy region of northern Italy. He was born about 1480 and trained with several local masters, but his life and art were transformed by encountering the work of Leonardo da Vinci, who visited Milan once in the late 15th century and again briefly in the early 16th century. Leonardo, as a young artist in Florence, painted several pictures with the same theme as that seen in this painting: the Christ child reaching for a flower. And it seems clear that Luini is indebted to Leonardo not only for this poignant theme but for other aspects of the painting as well: the dark background, the softness of the forms, the chiaroscuro (light and dark) modeling, the sweet sentiment of the figures, the turning pose of the Child.

   Luini was a great painter of religious images, including frescoes, wood panels, large altarpieces, and small devotional works for the home. He was obviously very popular in his own time, as there are countless copies of his paintings. Then he regained popularity in the 19th century when the famous critic John Ruskin decided that Luini was greater than Leonardo, and many readers went to Italy looking for his works.

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