Madonna Adoring the Sleeping Child  1560

This is an important early work by Giovanni Bellini, the greatest painter of fifteenth-century Venice and one of the key figures of European painting. Datable to the mid-1460s, its hard, linear quality is indebted to the example of Bellini’s brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna, as well as to the sculpture of Donatello, which Bellini studied in Padua. The sleeping child is a re...