Madona Lochis

In the 1470s Giovanni Bellini was turning out small Madonnas for the bedrooms and private chapels of Venetian households, and this is one of them, meant to be prayed to rather than admired in a gallery. The Virgin holds the Christ child behind a slab of marble parapet, a device Bellini used again and again to set the holy figures just beyond our own space. On that ledge he pinned a little painted scrap of paper carrying his signature, the kind of illusionistic trick Venetian painters enjoyed. It later belonged to Count Guglielmo Lochis, a Bergamo collector who left his pictures to the Accademia Carrara when he died in 1866, which is how a private Venetian devotional image came to carry his name.