Vierge à l'Enfant

Around 1460 Bellini was painting small pictures like this one in numbers, and they were not made for churches. In Venice a half-length Madonna of this size hung in an ordinary bedchamber or family room, the image a household prayed to first thing in the morning and last at night. That is why he brings the figures so close. Bellini gives the young mother a grave, inward look, the kind later writers have read as a quiet foreknowledge of how her child's life would end. And at the very front the Christ Child stands on a low stone ledge, a parapet set like a windowsill between the room you occupy and the holy pair just on the other side of it.