Madonna and Child

Around 1450, Venice still liked its holy images on gold, in the old Byzantine manner the city had kept for centuries. Jacopo Bellini was the man bringing something else into town, the new Florentine ideas of weight, space and a window onto the real world. This small Madonna and Child sits right on that seam. The shape of the panel and its frame open like a view through a window, a device that reached him partly from painters of the north, and the child has a soft human heaviness the older icons never asked for. Jacopo's sons Giovanni and Gentile, and his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna, would take these ideas much further. The panel itself spent years in a monastery near Lucca and was bought for the Uffizi in 1906.