Madonna col Bambino tra le sante Caterina e Maria Maddalena

By 1490 Giovanni Bellini was the leading painter of Venice, an old master in his sixties whose workshop would soon train Giorgione and Titian. This is one of his quiet devotional groupings, the Virgin and child set between two women saints, Catherine and Mary Magdalene, all of them emerging out of a plain dark ground with no room, no sky, nothing to place them. That darkness is deliberate. It pushes the soft, warm light entirely onto the faces and hands, which is what Bellini had learned to do with oil paint, then still fairly new to Venice. Nobody looks at anybody or speaks. The four heads are pressed close together in a hush, lit as if by a single low candle just out of frame.