Madonna Lehman

This is early Giovanni Bellini, from around 1470, before he became the painter who would define Venetian art for a generation. You can see who was on his mind. The sharp figures and the garland strung above the Madonna come straight from Andrea Mantegna, the exacting Paduan master who had married Bellini's sister. But look at the soft landscape and the way the paint seems to glow. Bellini was teaching himself the oil technique arriving from the Netherlands, which let him build light and depth that tempera never could. The little gourds woven into the garland are not decoration. In this period they were read as signs of the Resurrection, set deliberately above the sleeping child.