Madonna col Bambino

Bellini painted this Madonna in 1510, when he was around eighty and near the end of a very long career. He had trained most of the great Venetian painters of the next generation, including Giorgione and the young Titian, and by 1510 those younger men were transforming what a landscape in a picture could do. Rather than stand still, the old man kept learning from them. The warm, hazy countryside behind the Virgin, glowing as if lit from within, is really the heart of the painting. When conservators studied it under infrared, they found almost no drawing underneath: Bellini had built the whole image straight out of paint, in places pushing it around with his fingertips. He died six years later, still the most honored painter in Venice.