Madonna and Child with Saints

In Venice in the 1490s a family that wanted an altarpiece for its chapel commissioned it from a workshop, and the busiest workshop in the city was Bellini's. This panel was traditionally made for the Pesaro family, and along the edge of the balustrade it carries the name Iohannes Bellinus. The Louvre today catalogues it as the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, painted somewhere in the last quarter of the 15th century. Other catalogues still list it simply as Bellini, and the question stays open.

Behind that balustrade the Virgin holds the Child, with John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, George and Peter around them and the donor, the man who paid, kneeling among the saints.

By 1849 the panel was in London, owned by Charles Eastlake, who went on to run the National Gallery. It reached the Louvre in 1914, left by Baron Basile de Schlichting with the rest of his collection, and it hangs in the Grande Galerie.