Vierge à l'Enfant

This is early Bellini, painted around 1450 when he was barely out of his father Jacopo's Venetian workshop and still learning from the sharp draughtsmen of nearby Padua. You can feel two worlds pulling at it. The gold-ground stillness and the Madonna's lowered face come straight from the Byzantine icons Venice had traded in for centuries, while the hard, precise outline of the Christ Child belongs to the newer, more sculptural drawing coming out of Padua. Bellini would later loosen all of this into soft light and colour and become the painter who taught Venice how to glow. Here he is still tracing careful lines. The small panel now hangs in the Malaspina gallery in Pavia.