Madonna Frizzoni

When Bellini painted this Madonna, probably around 1470, the sculptor Donatello had not long left Padua, just west of Venice, where he had spent a decade covering altars in bronze and marble. That Florentine way of modelling figures in crisp, carved relief had soaked into the local workshops, and you can feel it here in the firm sculptural edges of the Virgin and the child she holds against a plain dark ground. For a long time nobody knew whose hand it was. The panel came from a private collection in Bergamo and reached the Museo Correr in Venice in 1891, and only then was it recognised as an early work by Giovanni Bellini and given the name of its former owner, Frizzoni.