Madonna col Bambino in un paesaggio

Few painters are as hard to pin down as Giorgione. He died young, probably of plague in 1510, and left almost no works that everyone agrees are his, so scholars argue over nearly every panel that carries his name. This small Madonna in the Hermitage is one of them. For a long time some specialists doubted it was his at all, while in recent decades opinion has warmed and more accept it as genuine, though the dates proposed for it still swing across more than ten years. What draws people to it is the mood, the soft light and the still landscape opening behind the figures, the drowsy calm that Giorgione's imitators would copy for a generation after his early death. The panel itself is small, well under half a meter high, an intimate devotional picture meant to be hung close in a private room.