Virgin and Child

Bellini Giovanni

(Venice c. 1434 - 1516)

The panel painting, signed Joannes Bellinus / faciebat on the cartouche, has in the past been the subject of debates regarding Bellini’s autography, also because Giovanni Bellini’s bustling workshop also produced numerous pieces for domestic use, replicas and variations based on the master’s ideas and drawings.

The attribution of the Virgin and Child to the Venetian master is now unanimous, due to the work’s pictorial qualities. The soft surfaces, the enamelled colouring and the clear natural luminosity that pervades the landscape as well as the foreground, would date the painting to the mature phase of Bellini’s career. The date was established at around 1510, in the opinion of critics, but recently brought forward to the early years of the century.

What emerges in the composition is the silent dialogue between Mother and Child, manifested in Mary’s restrained and self-conscious melancholy and the Child’s absorbed expression, mitigated by the human tenderness of her gestures. Here we find Bellini’s special ability for creating a relationship, both compositional and symbolic, between the protagonists and the background. Beyond the green curtain behind the Virgin is a landscape made up of hills and mountains shaded in the blue of the distance, with a path trodden by two wayfarers ending at the point where a rustling poplar stands, close to the Madonna and Child. The poplar is a well-known ancient funereal symbol and an omen, in the religious sphere, of the Passion of Christ, heralded also by the sadly pensive expressions of the Virgin and Child.

Object details

Commentary

The composition depicts the Virgin seated, with the Child in her arms, just behind a slender marble parapet in the foreground, bearing a cartouche with the painter’s signature.

The Madonna holds the Child on her left knee, with the corresponding hand holding him on her lap, while her right hand supports baby Jesus’ foot. She wears a rose coloured robe tied with a lace under the breast, and a blue mantle lined with golden ochre silk. A white veil partially covers her hair, parted in the middle, framing the full oval of her face. The neckline of the robe, the veil and the mantle have a border adorned with fine gold-embroidered foliage and whorls.

The fully formed Child, his head covered with a fine fluff of blond hair, his private parts barely covered by a golden yellow loincloth, tenderly clasps his mother’s hand. Both have lowered eyes and a pensive expression, a restrained melancholy in the Virgin and an absorbed expression in Jesus, who in the suspended movement of his barely open right hand and the twisting of his face seems to be turned towards Mary’s watchful gesture.

A green curtain behind the two figures, separating the sacred space from the background, is drawn halfway, showing the opening onto a glimpse of landscape. Its depth is defined by the successive backdrops of the hills, which also fade in tone and colour, absorbed in the last planes by the blue of the sky, furrowed by a denser accumulation of white clouds on the horizon. The main elements of the view, seen through the fine silhouette of the rustling poplar tree, are basic: a few buildings scattered in the distance, the two figures on the path whose serpentine course leads the eye along the path from the background to the foreground, pervaded by the same natural light as the landscape.

The luminous, pearly colours, characterised by calibrated harmonious colours and the slight shading that renders the softness of the flesh, the atmospheric sensitivity, are typical of the painter’s later works, as is the intense but perfectly controlled emotional charge.

The panel, first documented in the Borghese collection in the Inventario Fidecommissario of 1833, was probably acquired not long before this date.

The critical history of the painting, now quite firmly established, was initially controversial. Acknowledged by Crowe and Cavalcaselle (1871; 1912, p. 191) as an autograph work and then by Cantalamessa (1914, p. 105), it was considered by some scholars to be the work of pupils, despite the signature - written in an unusual cursive, as opposed to the more usual capital script - considered apocryphal. Proposals that opposed Bellini’s autography include those of Morelli (1890, p. 311; 1897, p. 242), who attributed it to Francesco Bissolo; Venturi, who first attributed it generically to the workshop and later to an anonymous person close to Rocco Marconi (1893, p. 112 and 1915, VII, pp. 588-589); Bernardini, who proposed an attribution to Vincenzo Catena (1910, p. 142); Gronau (1911, pp. 95-98) who, however, after initially attributing the work to the so-called pseudo-Basaiti, retraced his steps and returned the painting to the master. Almost all later critics agreed on the attribution to Bellini except for Dussler (1935, p. 151 and 1949, pp. 75, 101) and Robertson (1968, p. 116) who leaned towards the workshop and Heinemann (1962, I, p. 39) who assigned it to the “Master of the Three Ages of Man in the Pitti”. Today, the attribution to Giambellino is undisputed, supported also by the most recent restoration, which made the panel fully legible again, and by diagnostic investigations that revealed traces of the underlying drawing, partly carried over from a cartoon but accompanied by some freer strokes and some small pentimenti, such as the one aimed at slightly raising the Virgin’s right hand to better support the Son’s foot.

On the other hand, included in Giovanni Bellini’s vast production is the conception of numerous types of compositions of the Virgin and Child, always accompanied by a landscape background, repeated by his pupils in numerous replicas with small variations; a phenomenon that has contributed to the varying attributions of such works (contributions on the subject include A. Gentili, Giovanni Bellini, la bottega, i quadri di devozione, in “Venezia Cinquecento. Studi di Storia dell’arte e della cultura”, I, 2, pp. 27-60; A. Golden, Creating and re-creating, the practice of replication in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, in Giovanni Bellini and the art of devotion, edited by R. Kasl, Indianapolis 2004, pp. 90-127).

The composition of the Borghese panel, with Jesus seated on Mary’s knee, as she holds him with one hand and supports his foot with the other, has also been replicated several times: some attributed to Rocco Marconi, also in collaboration with the master, such as the one in Atlanta, High Museum of Art, and the one in Breslau, Muzeum Narodowe, are very close to the Borghese Madonna but in reverse; the same caring gesture of the Mother appears in the work attributed to Nicolò Rondinelli in Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilj and in the one attributed to Bellini and workshop in Indianapolis, Museum of Art.

Bellini’s workshop is responsible for the vast circulation of this genre of painting destined for private devotion, whose theme has an immediate impact due to its human aspect and compositional clarity, but which, behind an apparent simplicity, offers the possibility of infinite variations, of details that convey meaning, commenting on its fundamental function: the prefiguration of the Passion of Christ, which makes such works a private tool for devout meditation (E. Battisti, Le origini religiose del paesaggio veneto, Rome 1980; R. Goffen, Icon and vision: Giovanni Bellini’s half-length Madonnas, in “The Art Bulletin”, LVII, 1975, pp. 487-518); A. Gentili, Giovanni Bellini e il paesaggio di devozione, in “Rivista di estetica”, 45, 2005, n.s. 29, pp. 147-157).

In many cases this meaning is emphasised by known and immediately understood symbols from the religious context of origin, often held by or next to the infant Jesus, such as the apple alluding to original sin, the red headed goldfinch, a customary reference to the Passion, the closed book of Scripture, and so on, to which equally significant details are added, scattered around the landscape. The Child is sometimes depicted asleep, sometimes lying on a parapet - a symbolic reference to the altar or the anointing stone, with a cushion and sheet (R. Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, London 1989; Il colore ritrovato. Bellini a Venezia, exhibition catalogue [Venice, 30 September 2000-28 January 2001] edited by R. Goffn and G. Nepi Scirè, Milan 2000, pp. 8-9).

This representation instead offers a deeply effective and absolute minimalism, where the dialogue with the subject is created by the sensitive naturalness of the figures, the moving melancholy of the watchful expression of the Mother in silent dialogue with the Child. The enamelled clarity of the colour, together with the compositional expedient of the parapet and curtain, push the sacred group into the foreground, towards the observer, while from the background landscape, the subtle rustling poplar, an ancient and discreet funereal symbol of lamentation, alludes in a religious context to the Passion (Levi D’Ancona 1977, pp. 57-58).

The dating of the painting, by virtue of the atmospheric fusion, the softness in the execution of the flesh tones and drapery, and the openness of the landscape, places it in the last period of the artist’s career. In the 2019 catalogue of the Venetian master’s oeuvre, curator Mauro Lucco (pp. 269-285) re-examines the arc of his career and, re-reading the documents relating to the painter and his family, proposes - as already anticipated in the catalogue of the 2008 exhibition - a shift of his date of birth to around 1440, as opposed to the more usual position represented by critics for a date around the early 1430s, generally given as around 1534 (Goffen 1989, pp. 2-4 and App. I). In the entry on the Borghese Madonna in the same catalogue, Villa (2019, p. 530) traces the critical history of the painting and its dating, noting the dense network of interconnections with other works; among other things, for the group of the Madonna with Child he recalls a quotation in the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Peter and Mark and Three Venetian Prosecutors from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, dated 1510, a date which critics almost unanimously agreed upon for the Borghese panel. However, this author returns to the issue and, based on direct stylistic comparisons made on the occasion of the 2008 exhibition in Rome at the Scuderie del Quirinale, proposes an earlier dating of the work to the early 16th century.

Simona Ciofetta