The nursing Virgin was a well-established devotional subject by the fifteenth century, not an invention of any one painter. It grew out of a fourteenth-century shift in how Mary was pictured: instead of a jewelled, throned empress, painters increasingly showed her as a humble, approachable mother, sometimes seated on the ground, engaged directly with her child^[1]. Contemporary viewers read the exposed breast within this frame of maternal care and religious meaning rather than as an erotic image; period accounts insist explicitly that Mary's beauty stirred no desire in those who looked at her^[1]. Infant nourishment was also a matter of real anxiety in the period, since a wet nurse of poor character or a shortage of milk could be a matter of life and death for a child, which gave the image of Christ nursed at his mother's breast added emotional weight for the people who prayed before it^[1].

Small panels of the Madonna and Child, made for private devotion in a home rather than a church, were a staple product of Florentine painting workshops in the second half of the fifteenth century, and Verrocchio's bottega was no exception. A documented example of this type from Verrocchio's workshop survives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a tempera panel of the Madonna and Child from around 1470, comparable in scale and subject to the kind of work this page describes^[2]. Panels like this were produced in numbers, sometimes designed by the master and largely executed by assistants, which is why scholars cataloguing Verrocchio's painted output routinely qualify attributions with terms such as 'with assistance' or 'from his workshop' rather than treating every surviving panel as entirely autograph^[2].

Verrocchio is best known today for bronze sculpture, including his David and the equestrian monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, but painting was a significant part of his workshop's output during his lifetime. He trained first as a goldsmith and took up painting and sculpture from inclination rather than as a specialist in either, and Vasari records that his manner in both arts was shaped more by diligent study than by natural facility^[3]. His pupils included Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi, both of whom absorbed his approach to modelling faces and figures; di Credi in particular is recorded as a painter of numerous Madonnas, usually in circular format, working in Verrocchio's studio into his twenties^[3]. This workshop culture, where a master's design could be carried out with varying degrees of his own hand, is the context in which a painting like Madonna of the Milk was made.