Madonna and Child in Glory (c. 1605–1617): Art, History and Details

Madonna and Child in Glory (c. 1605–1617) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Isaac Oliver (French, c. 1565–1617).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

It is difficult to overstate the singularity of this work in 17th-century England. While the image has visual sources in works by Rubens and Federico Barocci, surely known to the cosmopolitan artist (who travelled to Italy, unusually for English artists at this moment), the object is iconographically unique. Oliver places a tender Virgin and Child (itself more closely linked to Catholic instead of Protestant imagery), in a heavenly, visionary setting, and incorporates the medieval iconography of the lactating Virgin with the Salvator Mundi, early Netherlandish in origin, but more commonly an Italian typology by the early seventeenth century.

Object facts

• Title: Madonna and Child in Glory
• Date: c. 1605–1617
• Creator attribution: Isaac Oliver (French, c. 1565–1617)
• Culture: England, 17th century
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: gouache and watercolor, heightened with gum arabic, with shell gold framing lines, on vellum, mounted on paper, vellum, and wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 27.5 x 20.5 cm (10 13/16 x 8 1/16 in.)
• Collection: P - British before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2011.2

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Mann, C. Griffith, and Amy Bracken Sparks. "Acquisitions 2011." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 52, no. 2 (March/April 2012): 10-27.
• Korkow, Cory, and Jon L. Seydl. British Portrait Miniatures: The Cleveland Museum of Art. 2013.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.