Madonna and Child

In the years around 1505 this same Madonna was being painted all over Venice. The design descends from a lost half-length composition by Giovanni Bellini, copied so often that signed versions survive from other hands, among them two by Bartolomeo Veneto dated 1502 and 1505. This panel is Bissolo's version of that popular type. What is his own is the setting behind the figures, a soft pastoral landscape in the manner Giorgione had just made fashionable, the Arcadian kind of view then spreading through Venice in the engravings of Giulio Campagnola. The picture's signature was long distrusted as a later addition, and its attribution wavered from the late 19th century into the 20th before the panel was accepted as fully Bissolo's own. It reached the Accademia in 1838, a gift from the collector Girolamo Contarini.