The Virgin is seated on clouds with a crescent-moon beneath and a radiating glory behind her; she holds the standing Christ Child to her left; while he blesses the spectator they both look down to an open book on her right knee. The composition belongs with a group of paintings of, apparently, the mid 1540s in which Tintoretto experimented with a motif from Central Italian painting: the Virgin's contrapposto pose and the standing, blessing Christ Child may be traced back to a late design of Raphael's and to Andrea del Sarto's 'Borgo Pinti Madonna' and 'Madonna della Scala', and seems to have been transplanted to Venice by Jacopo Sansovino in his 'Madonna della Loggetta.' The iconography of the sickle-moon and clouds beneath the pair has precendents in Northern European painting, such as Albrecht Dürer's frontispiece to the 'Marienleben' (1511). The novelty of this painting in the context of Venetian painting lies in its combination of the subject-type into the quasi-sculptural language of Central-Italian Madonna groups.