Madonna and Child in a Landscape

c. 1480/1485

Giovanni Bellini

Artist, Venetian, c. 1430/1435 - 1516

Shown from the waist up behind a stone ledge, a young woman nestles a nude baby against her chest in this vertical painting. Both have pale skin with a slight, rosy blush on their cheeks, and both have halos painted as delicate gold rings around their heads. The woman’s shoulders are angled to our left, and she looks down at the baby in that direction with hooded eyes. She has a slender face, a long, straight nose, smooth cheeks, and her pale pink lips are closed. The neckline and the cuffs of her garnet-red, gold-edged gown peek out from beneath a dark, spruce-blue mantle that covers her head and wraps around her body. She rests the baby along the stone ledge and holds him in the crook of her right elbow, to our left. In her other hand, she holds a small object, perhaps an apple. The baby also touches the fruit as he lies back along her arm. He has curly, ash-blond hair, a petite nose, and chubby cheeks. He looks up at the woman or beyond her with parted, downturned lips. The pair are warmly lit from the upper left and set against a fern and olive-green landscape. Near the left edge of the painting, a church and steeple are silhouetted along the horizon, which comes just under halfway up the composition. In the sky above, a clear, pale blue horizon gives way first to puffy, cream-white clouds and then swirling clouds in tones of pine green and slate gray along the top of the picture. An inscription appears on the lower center of the ledge, “IDEM Z.B.”

Media Options

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On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 12

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on panel

  • Credit Line

    Ralph and Mary Booth Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 71.7 x 52.8 cm (28 1/4 x 20 13/16 in.)
    framed: 115.4 x 97.6 x 6.2 cm (45 7/16 x 38 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.)

  • Accession

    1946.19.1

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Probably Bartolomeo della Nave, Venice; James, 3rd Marquess (later 1st Duke) of Hamilton [1606-1649], London, by c. 1638; Leopold Wilhelm, Archduke of Austria, by 1651.[1] (sale, Robinson, Fisher & Harding, London, 11 May 1922, no. 101, as The Virgin and Child by Bernardino Zacchetti); (Julius Böhler, Munich); sold 1922 to Ralph Harman [1873-1931] and Mary Batterman [d. 1951] Booth, Grosse Pointe, Michigan; gift 1946 to NGA.
[1] Ellis Waterhouse claimed, it would seem correctly, that the Bellini Madonna and Child depicted in Tenier's painting of Leopold Wilhelm's gallery in Brussels was identical with number 116 in a list of pictures, probably from the della Nave collection, compiled around 1638-1640, when the collection was offered for sale to the Marquess (later Duke) of Hamilton ("Paintings from Venice for Seventeeth-century England: Some Records of a Forgotten Transaction," Italian Studies 7 [1952]: 9, 18 [1-23]). Entry 116 reads "Our Lady p. 3 1/2 & 2 1/2 idem." The artist for number 116 in the inventory is given as "John Belin" in the previous item (115). Though Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, 2 vols., Washington, 1979: 1:51 n. 3, claimed that the measurements for number 116 are inconsistent with the NGA painting, in fact they agree both in the proportion of height to width and in the overall dimensions: the unit of measurement in the list is described as "palmi," or palms, a measurement used in Rome and elsewhere in Italy and equivalent to about 22 centimeters (Angelo Martini, Manuele di metrologia, Rome, 1883: 596 [reprint 1976]). This would make the dimensions of number 116 about 77 x 55 centimeters--very close to the current measurements of the NGA painting. Waterhouse calculated from comparing the 1638-1640 inventory and the engravings in Tenier's Theatrum Pictorium (Brussels, 1660) that over sixty pictures in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm came from the della Nave collection. The possibility that the NGA painting originally belonged to della Nave is increased by the fact that such a painting is not likely to have been purchased individually, given the taste for later art that informs the Leopold Wilhelm collection as a whole.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1923

  • Loan Exhibition of the Arts of the Italian Renaissance, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1923, no. 43.

  • Ralph H. Booth Loan Collection, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1923, no cat.

1927

  • Fifth Loan Exhibition of Old and Modern Masters, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1927, no. 6, as Madonna and Child.

1933

  • Sixteenth Loan Exhibition of Old Masters. Italian Paintings of the XIV to XVI Century, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1933, no. 97, as Madonna and Child.

1939

  • Masterpieces of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture from 1300-1800, New York World's Fair, 1939, no. 8, repro., as The Madonna and Child.

Bibliography

1927

  • Venturi, Adolfo. Studi dal vero: Attraverso le racolte artistiche d’Europa. Milan, 1927: 238, fig. 147.

1948

  • Recent Additions to the Ralph and Mary Booth Collection. Washington, 1948: unpaginated, repro.

1949

  • "Ralph and Mary Booth Bequest in der National Gallery of Art, Washington." Phoebus 2, no. 2 (1949): 73, repro.

1950

  • "Old Masters in America: Important Gifts to the National Gallery, Washington" The Illustrated London News (September 16, 1950): 449, repro.

1956

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. New York, 1956: 24, repro., as Madonna and Child.

1957

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Comparisons in Art: A Companion to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. London, 1957 (reprinted 1959): pl. 29.

1963

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 303, repro.

1965

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 12, as Madonna and Child.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 4, repro., as Madonna and Child.

1972

  • Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, MA, 1972: 23, 647.

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 22, repro., as Madonna and Child.

1979

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979: 1:50-51; 2:pl. 28.

1984

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 203, no. 244, color repro.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 42, repro.

1992

  • Tempestini, Anchise. Giovanni Bellini: catalogo completo dei dipinti. Florence, 1992: 128-129, no. 41, color repro.

2003

  • Boskovits, Miklós, and David Alan Brown, et al. Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2003: 60-63, color repro.

2019

  • Lucco, Mauro, Peter Humfrey, and Giovanni C.F. Villa. Giovanni Bellini: Catalogo ragionato. Treviso, 2019: 419-420, cat. 72.

Inscriptions

later addition by unknown hand, lower center on parapet: IDEM / Z.B.

Wikidata ID

Q20174296

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