The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels (Manchester Madonna)

The Manchester Madonna, also known as 'The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels', is a panel painting on wood attributed to Michelangelo around 1497, a period which marks the advent of the High Renaissance. This incomplete religious painting housed in the National Gallery of London, first gained public recognition at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857. Despite doubts about its attribution to Michelangelo during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholarly consensus now accepts it as his work. As one of his three surviving panel paintings, it epitomizes Michelangelo's mastery of tempera technique and religious iconography.