Sacra Conversazione

Around 1513, Venice had just lost the painter Giorgione to the plague, and his hushed, dreaming manner was passing to younger hands. One of them belonged to Giovanni Cariani, newly arrived from the hills near Bergamo, and this quiet devotional panel shows him working through what he had learned. The Madonna sits on a low stone podium, looking down at the Child, with Saint Lucy on one side and Mary Magdalene and Saint Joseph on the other, none of them speaking. Cariani closed the room with heavy red curtains, so the figures sit in a warm gloom, and then he cut a single opening in that dark, right above the head of Christ, onto a bright stretch of hills. The plan of a seated Virgin among standing saints in a shallow room came from Giovanni Bellini, the old master he would have studied in the city, while the soft, inward mood is closer to Giorgione. When the Contarini family gave the panel to the Accademia in 1838, no one was sure whose it was. It entered under the name of Giovanni da Udine, and only in 1903 did a scholar hand it back to Cariani.