Madonna of the Red Cherubim

Giovanni Bellini painted this around 1485, at the point he was quietly turning Venetian painting toward oil, soft light and real landscape. Look past the Virgin and Child and you get exactly that, a calm countryside of towers and castles, a river, a small boat. Then look up. The sky is filled with a ring of cherubim painted a flat, unnatural red, with blank hollow eyes, belonging to a much older way of picturing heaven. Bellini set them there on purpose, against his new naturalism, as a deliberate touch of the archaic. He was quoting a design by his own father, Jacopo Bellini, whose version still hangs a few rooms away in the same Venice gallery.