Madonna of the Cherries

Titian painted this around 1516, just as the old master Giovanni Bellini died and Titian, still in his twenties, was becoming the leading painter of Venice. You can still feel Bellini in it, the tender half-length Madonna set behind a stone ledge. But the touch is Titian's, warmer and more physical. The child leans on that ledge and holds out cherries to his mother. They look like a simple treat, and they carried a darker meaning a 16th-century viewer would have caught at once: cherries were the fruit of paradise, and their deep red stood for the blood Christ would later shed. Saint John the Baptist and Joseph press in from the sides against a curtain of gold-worked crimson.