Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, 'The Virgin and Child', about 1505

The Virgin Mary sits on a marble bench in front of a sunlit Italian landscape, her body forming a solid mass which we can almost feel pressing down on the cool stone. There is hardly a cloud in the sky and Mary gazes out with unruffled serenity. Behind her, a placid river wanders through green hills dotted with houses and churches – there are even the remains of a classical temple on a ridge to the left. A young man strolls along the road on the right, a donkey grazes peacefully on the left. The quiet waters of the river reflect the arches of the bridge almost undisturbed. In the distance, crumbling towers and rocky crags typical of the Veneto Alpine foothills fade to blue mountains.

Only the pose of the Christ Child disturbs the calm. He balances somewhat precariously on his mother’s lap, pulling away from her restraining fingers. He holds a small bird, a linnet, perhaps a symbolic allusion to the Passion (although the bird commonly used for this purpose was a goldfinch). The marble bench on which Mary sits might also be a reference to an altar table, on which Christ’s sacrifice was reenacted in the Mass.

The artist, Cima da Conegliano, has signed his name on the marble parapet along the front. This was one of his most popular designs, and he and his workshop produced a number of versions of it once he had taken over from Giovanni Bellini as the leading Venetian producer of altarpieces. This panel is a reworking in reverse of a design made for another set, of which another Virgin and Child is one, probably dating from some years previously. The position of Christ has changed: here, he leans away from his mother rather than snuggling up to her, breaking the line of the triangle they form in the other painting and making the whole composition feel less stable. It has been compared to a painting of the same subject now in the Museo Nazionale Atestino, Este, dated to 1504, where the position of the infant Christ makes more sense – he reaches for the cross held out to him by Saint John the Baptist. The Roman bridge in the background is similar to that in the Saint Sebastian of the Mestre triptych of about 1500–2 (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg).

Although they are biblical figures, Christ and his mother have here been transposed to northern Italy of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. This trick of placing holy figures in versions of contemporary landscapes was very characteristic of Cima, as seen in a differentVirgin and Child and in Saint Jerome in a Landscape. He perhaps took the idea from Bellini, although Antonello da Messina was also an influence.

The marble parapet along the front serves to push the Virgin and Child back, creating a feeling of three dimensional space, which is then reinforced by the aerial perspective of the landscape behind them. The clear light which infuses the whole painting and the rich colours are also typical of Cima’s work.