Madonna with the Child

Venice in these years looked east as much as west. Its ships worked the ports of the Greek world and Byzantine icons hung in its churches, so when the young Bellini painted this Madonna around 1460 he gave her the gold ground and the Greek lettering of that tradition, which is why it has long been called the Greek Madonna. The mother is tender but not happy. Her eyes are lowered and grave, and the child she holds seems already weighed down. Bellini was in his father's workshop then, learning too from his brother-in-law Mantegna, whose hard clear line you can feel in the folds of the cloth. The picture is tempera on wood, worked in thin exact layers, the technique he would soon trade for the softer oil that made his later Madonnas famous.