Though he made his career in Venice, Giovanni Battista Cima hailed from Conegliano, a hilltop town to the north, and owed his surname to the profession of his father, a cloth-cutter (or cimatore). His portrayals of the Virgin and Child, clear and luminous, owe much to stylistic and iconographic developments in contemporary Venetian painting. Here, the rolling hills and fortified city in the background reference the landscape of the painter’s childhood.