Madonna and Child

By 1509 Giovanni Bellini had been painting in Venice for more than half a century, and he was somewhere near 78 years old. A younger generation, led by Giorgione, had brought in a softer, more atmospheric way of handling landscape, and this small devotional picture shows the old master quietly taking it up. Behind the Virgin and the blessing child hangs a green cloth, and past its edge the land opens onto hazy blue mountains and a lone country figure. The curtain is a device that closes off the holy pair in a shared, intimate space while letting the world breathe beyond them. Painted for the Mocenigo, a Venetian family who kept it for three centuries, it was the kind of half-length Madonna Bellini turned out for private prayer to the very end of his long life.