Madonna and Child

Around 1470 Giovanni Bellini was still a young Venetian painter working in the long shadow of his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, who had married Bellini's sister and whose hard, engraved line dominated painting across northern Italy. You can see that inheritance in this small devotional panel. The Child's hair is drawn with an almost metallic precision, each strand separate, and the figures have a firm sculptural weight. What is beginning to happen, though, is softer. Venetian light and colour are warming the edges, loosening Mantegna's severity toward the glow that Bellini would reach a few years later in the great Coronation of the Virgin at Pesaro. For a long time none of this was visible. The panel's quality only emerged after a cleaning in 1949, which lifted away what had dulled it. It hangs today in the Pinacoteca dei Concordi in Rovigo, a tall, narrow tempera panel.