Virgin and Child

In 1479 Venice made peace with the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, and the city sent Gentile Bellini to Constantinople to work at his court. Giovanni, his younger brother, stayed behind and took over the history paintings in the hall of the Great Council in the Doge's Palace, all of which burned in the fire of 1577. What kept a Venetian workshop running between state commissions were pictures like this one, a Virgin and Child on a wooden panel for a private house, made to be looked at from close up. Bellini usually set his Madonnas against a landscape. Here the ground behind them is plain black, which is rare in his work, and the child's hand rests on a closed book. The panel was one of the first purchases made for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, years before the museum opened in 2017.