Within the painting, the
narrow space in which the woman is seated, with child and tome in lap, is
otherwise toned by a severe symmetry. Furniture, window and angles are cut
with a perfect sharpness, exposing only rightly angled arrangement. This
is even so with the corners of a throw rug and some square floor tiles
which peek out from the Madonna's flowing red gown.
The colors in this gown, as with the green and white embroidered
parlor headboard which looms comfortingly over the figures, represent the
most dramatic and compelling of impressions here. The gown in particular
drapes across the woman's shoulders and spills out in dominant array in the
direct center of the image. Creased and shadowed by its own fabric, the
gown seems to jump from the canvas as a lucid photograph flanked by sharply
painted objects. Among such objects, a brass chamber pot to the bottom...
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