Holy Family with St. John and Mary Magdalene

When this was painted in Venice, probably around 1508, Giovanni Bellini was still the city's leading painter and the young Titian was only beginning, and that older, gentler world shows in the soft half-length Virgin set against open country. She shares the panel with two visitors. Mary Magdalene sits on the ground with the jar of ointment that always identifies her, and the infant John the Baptist stands at the right with his little reed cross and a lamb at his feet, while Joseph rests on the left. Scholars have never agreed on when Palma made it. Some read the Bellini-like design as early work from about 1508 to 1510, others place it a decade or more later, and Bernard Berenson suspected his workshop lent a hand. The panel took a long way round to Florence. It hung in the imperial collection in Vienna until 1793, when it was traded to the Uffizi.