Madonna Willys

Giovanni Bellini painted Madonnas for decades in Venice, dozens of them, and worked out a formula so satisfying that other painters simply borrowed it. This one, from the 1480s, shows the standing Christ child reaching up to embrace his mother, both set as half-figures behind a low parapet. That embrace was unusual, and Bellini keeps a slight, deliberate distance between the two faces, a reserve that hints at the divinity behind the tenderness. Painters across the Veneto copied the design closely for years afterward, which is one measure of how right he had got it. The panel eventually left Europe entirely. It was bought in New York in 1947 for a new museum in Sao Paulo, and hangs there today among the collection's Old Masters.