Madonna der Cherubim

For a long time this panel hung under the wrong name. Until 1885 it was taken for the work of Giovanni Bellini, and only a cleaning revealed the harder, more sculptural hand of his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna beneath the old repaints. Mantegna sets the Virgin and Child against a dense ring of small winged heads, the cherubim of the title, packed shoulder to shoulder like carved stone. Mother and child do not meet each other's eyes. Her expression is inward and heavy, the look of someone who already knows how her son's story will end. The painting reached Milan in 1808, taken from a Venetian church closed under Napoleon's suppression of the religious houses.