Virgin and Child

This icy, otherworldly Madonna is the right half of the Melun Diptych, painted for Etienne Chevalier, treasurer to King Charles VII of France. By long tradition the crowned Virgin, with her shaved high forehead, globe-like bared breast, and impossibly pale skin, is a portrait of Agnes Sorel, the king's celebrated mistress, who had recently died. Fouquet reduces the figures to cool, almost abstract geometry and rings them with vivid red and blue cherubim, an effect at once sacred and unsettling. The greatest French painter of his century, Jean Fouquet had traveled to Italy, and here fuses Northern precision with Italian clarity of form into something wholly his own.