Madonna and Child in a Landscape

Behind a stone parapet the Virgin holds the sleeping Christ Child along her arm, his cheek against the ledge, a small fruit resting between his hands and hers; she wears a garnet-red gown trimmed with gold beneath a deep spruce-blue mantle, and both heads are ringed with thin halos of gold. Beyond them an olive-green landscape opens to a church and steeple on the horizon, while the pale blue sky gathers into cream-white then pine-green and slate-grey clouds along the top of the panel. A single line of inscription, “IDEM Z.B.,” is cut into the stone below. Giovanni Bellini, the greatest of the Venetian painters of his generation, made this intimate half-length Madonna around 1480–85, in the years when his warm colour and calm, grave naturalism reshaped devotional painting across northern Italy. The panel was probably in the Venice collection of Bartolomeo della Nave, passed to the Duke of Hamilton in London by about 1638 and to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria by 1651; it left the Habsburg collection in 1922, was bought that year by Ralph Harman and Mary Batterman Booth of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and came to the National Gallery of Art as their gift in 1946. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.