巴赫圣母

Around 1508 the young Titian was working in Venice so close to Giorgione that people still argue over which of them painted what. That same year the two men frescoed the outside of the German merchants' warehouse on the Grand Canal together. This small Madonna belongs to those early days. Technical study of the panel shows that Titian first set the mother and child upright and formal, the way holy figures were supposed to sit, then loosened them into a private moment of affection, cheek near cheek. He echoed that closeness in the tree behind them, whose two trunks join at the root. The name came much later, from Jules Bache, the New York banker who owned the picture in the 1920s before it reached the Metropolitan.