Madonna col Bambino e donatore

By 1505 Giovanni Bellini was an old man, in his seventies, and had led the painters of Venice for a lifetime. Around that time the young German Albrecht Durer was working in the city, and he wrote home that Bellini was very old but still the best painter of them all. This small devotional picture shows the kind of work that kept that reputation intact. The Virgin holds the Child with a calm, faintly sorrowful tenderness, a kneeling patron who paid for the panel is tucked into one corner, and a soft Italian landscape opens out behind them. For a long time the painting was credited to a follower named Basaiti, until scholars recognised the master's own hand in it.