La Vierge aux arbustes

Bellini signed and dated this on the marble ledge at the bottom, 1487, only the second time he put a year on a picture. The two thin trees at either side of the green cloth give it its everyday name, the Madonna of the Small Trees. What makes it quietly remarkable is the light. The Virgin casts a soft shadow onto the cloth behind her, and beyond the trees the land falls away to distant hills in the warm haze of a Venetian evening. Bellini had recently mastered oil paint, the medium that let him blend shadow into skin this gently, and the delicacy owes something to Antonello da Messina, the Sicilian who had brought the technique to Venice about a decade earlier.