The Virgin and Child by Giovanni Bellini

The Virgin and Child by Giovanni Bellini (probably 1480–1500)

Mother, child and a piece of fruit

The Virgin is shown at half length behind a marble ledge, wrapped in a deep blue mantle that covers her head, with a white veil framing her face and a thin gold halo behind it. She looks down. Her right hand holds up something small and round, apparently a piece of fruit, and the Child reaches up to take it; her left hand rests against the back of his head, supporting it.

The Child is naked. He half sits, half lies on a white cushion with a tassel at its corner, which has been set on the ledge, and he leans back with one arm propped on the cushion and his feet at the ledge's edge. He does not look at the fruit but up at his mother's face.

Behind them the picture is split in two. At the left hangs a heavy red curtain. At the right, beyond it, is open country: a rocky outcrop with walls and a fortified building on its summit, under a grey sky with clouds. On the front of the ledge a small painted label carries the Latin form of the painter's name, IOANNES BELLINVS. The National Gallery lists the panel as signed.

The ledge as a tomb

The National Gallery reads the ledge as more than furniture. Christ's bare body on a marble parapet, it says, was probably meant to recall his dead body laid in the tomb, a reminder of the belief that by dying as an adult he redeemed humanity. The museum describes the Virgin as very young, holding his head gently and looking at him with a sorrowful gaze. Bellini used the marble parapet often in his pictures of the Virgin and Child.

Painting for prayer at home

In the 1470s and 1480s Bellini produced a series of small devotional pictures of the Virgin and Child for Venetian patrons to pray before in private, and the National Gallery places this panel in that production, dating it probably 1480–1500. It is oil on poplar, 78.7 by 58.4 centimetres. The museum gives Bellini's dates as about 1435 to 1516.

What the scientists found

The gallery's technical examination has shown how the picture changed as Bellini worked on it. Infrared reflectography reveals his underdrawing: the Child's hair was first drawn curly, then painted straight, and a canopy drawn over the figures was never painted. X-rays show that the red curtain at the left was painted over a landscape at an early stage, so the view once ran further across the panel. Photomicrographs show Bellini's fingerprints, left where he blotted areas of paint with his hand.

The surface is still covered by a nineteenth-century varnish that has yellowed considerably, and it gives the whole picture a brownish tone. The blues and reds in any reproduction, including this one, are seen through that layer.

From Naples to London

The National Gallery traces the panel to the collection of Giacomo Lazzari in Naples, who had died by 1843. Sir Charles Eastlake bought it at some point between 1855 and 1865. At Lady Eastlake's sale on 2 June 1894 (lot 57) it was bought by C. Davis for Ludwig Mond, and it was shown at the New Gallery in London in 1894–5. It came to the National Gallery with the Mond Bequest in 1924, which is why it is sometimes called the Mond Madonna. Its inventory number is NG3913.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole panel in its upright format, so the curtain, the view of the hill town and the signed label on the ledge are all included.

Sources: National Gallery, London, NG3913 (nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/giovanni-bellini-the-virgin-and-child) · Wikimedia Commons, File:Bellini_-_The_Virgin_and_Child,_probably_1480-1500.jpg · Wikidata Q26713861