Madonna Dudley

By about 1508, when this was painted, Giovanni Bellini was near 80 and the grand old man of Venetian painting. Around him the city's art was being remade by much younger men, Giorgione and the young Titian, who softened outlines and let colour and light do the modelling. Rather than resist them, the old master took the new manner in, and his late Madonnas grew quieter and warmer for it. This is a small half-length made for private prayer at home, not for a church altar. Mother and child both look straight out at the viewer, and Mary's left hand hovers by the infant's right foot without quite touching it. Behind them opens the kind of calm, low horizon Bellini spent his last years perfecting.