A knife blade engraved with the music and words for grace

if the musical knives were out for a special occasion round a 16th-century family table. “The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy” is the focus of the exhibition, called Madonnas and Miracles. It covers furniture, jewellery, ceramics, sculpture and paintings.

We like visiting Europe not only for the wine and the weather but also for the wonderful works of art to be seen there. What the Fitzwilliam has done is to bring together Italian items from abroad and from British collections. Being quite open to the funny things that foreigners got up to in past centuries, we come away from the exhibition better placed to consider what might also have been the way of life in Britain, though much of its material expression was obliterated by chance and policy.

Commenting on those knives, one of the curators of the exhibition, Deborah IHS, standing for the name of Jesus. Similarly, a cassone from the Veneto region has a chessboard decorating the top, but the IHS monogram on the underside of the lid.

The bedroom was often a place for devotions, and Vittore Carpaccio depicts the infant Virgin Mary being given a bath by an elderly woman in a comfortable bedroom while her mother Anne rests on one elbow in bed. Around the time of birth, the room is a female microcosm. Another woman has a bowl of something nourishing to spoon-feed the new mother. On the wall by the bed, beneath a lamp, hangs a plaque saying not Home Sweet Home, but (in Hebrew) “Holy Holy Holy. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

It doesn’t really look like a Jewish home in the first century BC, but it does look like an early 16th-century ideal home in Italy – and for that matter in England.