Madonna and Child in a Landscape
After Giovanni Bellini·c. 1490/1500
Historical Context
This Madonna and Child in a Landscape, attributed to a follower after Giovanni Bellini and dated ca. 1490–1500, belongs to the large body of devotional works produced in and around Bellini's workshop to meet the demand for his celebrated combination of warm Venetian colour, atmospheric landscape, and serene Marian iconography. Bellini himself produced numerous versions of the Madonna in a landscape, and his workshop and close followers extended this production to meet demand from private collectors and institutional patrons throughout the Veneto. The formula — the half-length Madonna before an open landscape window, the Christ Child blessing or embracing his mother — was Bellini's most celebrated contribution to devotional painting, and its influence on Giorgione and the young Titian was decisive for the entire subsequent development of Venetian painting.
Technical Analysis
The after-Bellini composition follows the master's formula with careful attention to the landscape parapet separating the figures from the receding countryside — warm Venetian colour in the foreground giving way to cool atmospheric blues at the horizon. The flesh is smooth and luminous in the Bellinesque manner.
Provenance
Otto Wesendonk [1815-1896], Berlin; his heirs; lent 1909 to the city of Bonn;[1] returned to Wesendonk heirs; (Wesendonk sale, Lempertz, Cologne, 27 November 1935, no. 4). (Duveen Brothers, Inc., London and New York); March sold 1937 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[2] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] The painting was lent by the city of Bonn to the Provinzialmuseum, Bonn, from 1909 until 1935, and published in the museum's catalogue as number 6. [2] The Duveen Brothers letter confirming the sale of twenty-four paintings, including NGA 1939.1.262, is dated 9 March 1937; the provenance is given as "Wesendonck[sic] Collection" (copy in NGA curatorial files; Box 474, Folder 5, Duveen Brothers Records, accession number 960015, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles). See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1357.
