Madonna and Child

By 1510 Bellini was in his eighties and had run Venetian painting for so long that his own pupils were taking the work. Giorgione died that year in an outbreak of plague, and Titian was moving into the big public commissions. Bellini went on making small devotional pictures for private rooms, painted in oil rather than the tempera he had trained in, which is what let him grade the shadows on the Madonna's face so finely. A green cloth is held up behind the two figures like a screen, and a bare tree stands against the sky at the upper right. Even the authorship went in and out of doubt. The panel passed through a London saleroom in 1919 catalogued as school of Bellini, and it reached Atlanta in 1958 as a gift from the Kress Foundation, under his own name again.