Alvise Vivarini, 'Virgin and Child', about 1483-5

With a tender embrace, the Virgin Mary steadies the Christ Child who is perched on the ledge before her. Tottering slightly, the child leans into his mother’s body as his small hand moves to grip the neckline of her dress. With her right arm wrapped tightly around him, her left hand is poised to catch a fall. Their faces are a hairsbreadth apart and the contours of the child’s rounded forehead and the mother’s sunken eye socket mirror one another. They gaze towards each other, not the viewer; she looking down and he upwards. The scene’s intimacy is emphasized by Mary’s brilliant red robe which is wrapped around their two bodies – a single burst of colour in an otherwise muted palette of earthy greens, greys and browns. Over his long-sleeved smock, Christ wears a short green tunic. The roundness of his small belly is accentuated by swaddling around his waist. The folds of the Virgin’s greyish-blue dress catch the light. Shown in a moment of domesticity, she wears no crown or jewellery, and her hair is hidden under a modest cap and veil. Their haloes too are understated, painted only with fine rings of gold.

Alvise Vivarini painted the Virgin and Child many times, always placing them in a sparse interior behind a parapet, against a dark green curtain pulled back from a window overlooking a mountainous landscape. Even so, his treatment of this subject was never repetitive, as we can see by comparing this painting with another, The Virgin and Child, of the same subject by him in the Gallery’s collection. The creased cartellino (Italian for small piece of paper) lying on the sill almost certainly originally bore Alvise’s signature and perhaps a date, just as in The Virgin and Child, but the inscription is no longer visible. Nonetheless, the painting is easily identifiable as the work of Alvise in the early 1480s, during which time his art moved away from the traditionally linear style of the Vivarini family workshop to a more softened approach, focused on modelling over line. This transition reflects the innovations of the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, whose work in Venice between 1475 and 1476 had a profound effect on local artists, not least Alvise. He used the newly adopted oil medium to model form using soft gradations of light and shade, together with strong outlines.

Since this painting’s provenance can only be traced to the late nineteenth century, we do not know the identity of the original patron. However, its small size and muted colours suggest that it was intended for private devotion, probably within a home.