Art card Dürer, Virgin and Child, Uffizi Florence, early twentieth century

Italian art postcard in sepia collotype reproducing a detail of Albrecht Durer's Adoration of the Magi, showing the seated Virgin with the naked Christ Child. The detail is taken from the painting of 1504 held in the collection of the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. The card bears the caption Firenze, Galleria Uffizi, La Vergine, dettaglio dell'Adorazione de' Magi, followed by the italianised name form Durero Alberto. Printed under the number 2470 on paper carrying the Universal Postal Union international imprint on the reverse, without correspondence lines on the picture side. Unposted, in good condition with slight discolouration and minimal handling marks.

The Adoration of the Magi was painted by Durer in 1504 as part of an altarpiece for Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, and entered the Uffizi collections in 1793. The seated Madonna in the detail is a portrait study of remarkable realism, in which the headscarf, the belt and the folds of the garment refer to the everyday bourgeois dress of Nuremberg around 1500 rather than to the stylised iconographic formulas of the late Gothic. The italianised form Durero Alberto, employed on this card, gradually disappeared from Italian printed matter after the First World War and helps to place the card in the years before 1918. Italian museum cards of this period were distributed on a large scale among visitors to the Uffizi, one of the most frequently visited art institutions of Europe.