Sacra conversación Balbi

Titian painted this around 1513, when he was still in his twenties and Venice had just lost Giorgione, the painter whose soft, dreamy landscapes had set the local fashion. You can feel Giorgione in the warm open country to the right, but the confidence is already Titian's own. The picture is what Italians call a sacra conversazione, a holy conversation, though no one speaks. The Virgin and Child, two saints, and the man who paid for the work are bound together entirely by looks, a quiet circuit of glances that runs from the kneeling donor round to the mother. It takes its name, the Balbi, from a Genoese family who once owned it, and it stayed in private hands until a collector bought it in 1962.