Vierge à l'Enfant

This is early Bellini, painted around 1460, when he was still working in the shadow of two men, his father Jacopo and his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, whose hard sculptural line you can feel in the sharp folds and the crisp halo. The Christ Child holds a piece of fruit, a quiet reminder of original sin and of the Passion still to come. Bellini signed the work on a painted marble ledge along the bottom, a Venetian trick for pretending the holy figures stand just behind a real parapet. Known as the Madonna Trivulzio after a later owner, it hangs in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.