Madonna with sleeping Child

Around 1475 in Venice, Giovanni Bellini painted the Virgin not cradling her son but watching over him as he sleeps, her fingertips pressed together in prayer. The child lies propped on cushions along a stone parapet, the ledge that in Bellini's pictures brings the holy figures right up to the viewer's own space. The sleep is not only rest. People then would have read a sleeping Christ Child as a quiet sign of the death to come, the infant already laid out like the man he will be. One small break from custom: her mantle here is red, not the usual blue. These were the years Venice was learning oil painting, yet this panel is still done in the older egg tempera, its colours built up in fine dry strokes.