Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine and John the Baptist

By about 1505, painting in Venice was changing under Giorgione's hand. He worked with soft light and blurred edges instead of sharp outline, letting figures settle into the air around them. This small panel shows the Virgin and Child between Catherine of Alexandria and John the Baptist, gathered close in the quiet, wordless gathering the Venetians called a sacra conversazione. What makes it hard to pin down is Giorgione himself. He died young, around 1510, in one of the plagues that swept the city, and left only a handful of pictures anyone can securely call his. So intimate works like this one drift in and out of his catalogue, and some scholars have proposed his gifted follower Sebastiano del Piombo instead. The question has never fully settled. It entered the Accademia in 1838, and at barely 80 centimetres across it was made for private prayer, held or hung close, not read from across a church.