聖母子

This is early Giovanni Bellini, painted around 1470 when he was still a young man in Venice, working his way out from under the shadow of his brother-in-law Mantegna. It is a quiet thing, the Virgin and the sleeping Child, the kind of intimate devotional picture Venetians kept in the home rather than a church. The strange part is where it hangs now, in Ajaccio on Corsica. The paintings there came from Cardinal Joseph Fesch, Napoleon's uncle, who left about a thousand of them to the town where Napoleon was born. In 2011 a museum guard walked out with this Bellini and three other works, and the police recovered them the following year.