The Lenti Madonna or Bache Madonna is a tempera and gold on panel painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Carlo Crivelli, executed c. 1472–1473, and signed OPVS KAROLI CRIVELLI VENETI. It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which it entered in 1944.[1]
Small and intended for private devotion, it was probably the work seen by Orsini around 1790 in Pier Giovanni Lenti's house in Ascoli Piceno with a "K" in its signature rather than the more usual "C" - the alternative candidate is the Ancona Madonna (probably c. 1480), but that is signed "CAROLI" not "KAROLI". The first definitive mention of the work dates to 1852, placing it in the Jones Collection in Clytha, from which it passed to the Baring Collection in 1871 and then the Northbrook Collection. The Duveen Brothers acquired it in 1927, ceding it to Jules S. Bache, before finally passing to its present collection.[2]
The Madonna stands half-figure behind a parapet, on which, isolated by a cushion and a hanging cloth (where a hanging card bears the signature), the Child is seated, clutching a little bird in his hands, a symbol of his future Passion. Behind Mary hangs a curtain beyond which a landscape can be seen on the sides, and above hangs a festoon of leaves, large apples and pumpkins.
The painting's miniature preciousness, the splendor of details such as Mary's damask dress, and the extreme attention to details such as the expressive hands of the woman, long and tapered, the cracks in the marble, the fly resting on the parapet, may be influenced by Flemish art.[1]
Stylistic details bring the dating of the work close to works such as the 1476 Altarpiece and the Second Triptych of the Valle Castellamo.