A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

599. THE MADONNA OF THE MEADOW.

Giovanni Bellini (Venetian: 1426-1516). See 189.

See also (p. xix)

A very charming little picture, marred only by a certain insipidity in the expression of the Madonna—which contrasts markedly alike with the pathetic type of Bellini's early Madonnas (e.g. No. 288), and with the more stately type which he afterwards adopted (as in the altar-piece in the Academy at Venice). "The landscape is altogether interesting, and will well repay a long examination. The incident of the bird and the serpent should not be missed, and the Eastern sheep with the long ears and its stately attendant in the white burnous should be noted as an attempt to give some Oriental character to the scene" (Monkhouse: In the National Gallery, p. 220). "The exquisite opaline purity of its daylight, the delicacy and finish of every detail, the walls and towers of the little town serene in the rays of morning, and the mountain ranges, pure and lovely in definition—all these graces make the picture one of the joys of art" (Gilbert's Landscape in Art, p. 330).

This picture has at different times been given several different attributions, of which the most cautious was "School of Bellini." In earlier editions of the Official Catalogue it was ascribed to Basaiti (see 281); but now (1898) to Bellini. Sir Edward Poynter refers in support of this alteration to the close resemblance of the present picture to a signed work by Bellini in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and, as regards the background, to No. 812 in our gallery. Sir Walter Armstrong (Notes on the National Gallery, p. 24) draws attention to the similarity in the baby's hands here and in 224, and would ascribe both pictures to Catena. The correct settlement of disputed points of attribution like this is highly important for the history of painting, but meanwhile the very fact of such disputes has a useful significance, as showing what is meant by the old "schools" of painting. Individual peculiarities are only discovered by minutest examinations; but beneath such differences there are in each school similarities of treatment and conception which come from common traditions and common teaching, and which cause critics of equal intelligence to attribute the same pictures to different masters of the school.