Madonna von Alzano

Bellini painted this around 1485, in the years when Venetian painters were beginning to study Flemish pictures that reached the city through trade. You can see what he took from them in the background here, where the land opens out behind the Virgin into tiny villages, small figures, and hazy light rendered in patient detail. In front of all that quiet distance sits a marble ledge, and on the ledge a single pear, which is why the picture is also called the Madonna of the Pear. The fruit is not decoration. It was read as a sign of Christ's coming sacrifice, placed close to the viewer while the world stretches away behind. The panel has been in Bergamo since the 16th century, said to have arrived with the dowry of an abbess from Alzano Lombardo, which gave the painting its name.