Madonna and Child

Giovanni Bellini painted this small panel around 1510, when he was roughly 80 and had been the leading painter in Venice for a generation. By then a younger crowd, Giorgione and the rising Titian among them, was pushing Venetian painting toward something looser and warmer, and you can feel Bellini keeping pace. The colours are soft and enamel-smooth, and a clear even light spreads across the landscape behind the figures. Mary holds the Child on a stone ledge and looks down with a quiet, almost sorrowful tenderness. On that ledge he signed his name in Latin, Joannes Bellinus, the way he had signed so many of these small devotional pictures across his long career.