MASP

Giovanni Bellini

The Virgin with the Standing Child Embracing his Mother (Madonna Willys), 1480-90

  • Author:
    Giovanni Bellini
  • Bio:
    Veneza, Itália, 1430-Veneza, Itália ,1516
  • Title:
    The Virgin with the Standing Child Embracing his Mother (Madonna Willys)
  • Date:
    1480-90
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre madeira
  • Dimensions:
    75 x 58,5 x 4,5 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Walther Moreira Salles, 1957
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00016
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



A member of a family of artists, Bellini collaborated with his father, the painter Jacopo Bellini (1396–1470), until he began receiving his own commissions. The artist’s rigorous design and the expressiveness of the figures portrayed are qualities he assimilated from his brother-in-law, painter Andrea Mantegna (circa 1431–1506). In 1483, Bellini became an official painter of the Republic of Venice, where he ran the largest studio at the time. In MASP’s painting The Virgin with Standing Child, Embracing His Mother (Madonna Willys), Bellini shows a certain distance between Mary and Jesus. While their bodies are close, the facial expressions are melancholic, and Mary seems to avoid her son’s gaze; they lack the tenderness seen in so many other Italian madonnas from the same period. The painting presents the two figures behind a parapet, which separates the spectator from the scene, emphasizing the transcendence of the subjects’ divine nature in contrast to earthly life. The parapet may also suggest an altar on which the child is being offered in sacrifice. In this work, Bellini incorporated the spatiality proposed by Florentine painting, characterized by the depth of the space, without losing the symbolism and formal rigor of Byzantine art.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015

Source: Adriano Pedrosa and Olivia Ardui (org.), Pocket MASP with TATE, São Paulo: MASP, 2018.





The iconography of The Virgin with the standing Child, Embracing his Mother (Madonna Willys) represented as a half-gure, behind a parapet, is extremely unusual in other painters, whereas it is almost a constant in Bellini’s innumerable Virgins. Rather than being simply a formal preference, it is possible that this compositional device involves theological speculation. According to a hypothesis put forward by Go­en (1975) and reworked by Camesasca (1987), this is an iconographic variant of Byzantine symbology, originally pertaining only to the representation of Christ, in which the half-gure would be a metaphor to suggest “the whole aspect” of the divine, as if this reduction would t it to human intelligence. is idea was posed at the outset of the 13th century by Nikolaos Mesarites of Constantinople. In any event, it seems certain that Bellini was seeking, especially in the Masp work, the most heightened sacredness for the sacred. e interaction between the gures, though intense, has nothing of the domestic a­ectivity that is so attractive in so many Italian Quattrocento Virgins (with Child). On the contrary, the sacredness of the group is underscored, on the one hand, by the iconostastic function of the parapet cutting o­ the viewer from the representation of the divine, and, on the other, by the boundary line between this sacred space and the profane landscape. is compartmentalization, these conceptual di­erentiations sensitive to space, or pictorial spaces, demonstrate Bellini’s disinterest in the axiom of unity of space imposed by the Florentine perspective. They show his drive to invent a space capable of conciliating a new painting landscape with a space reminiscent of the Byzantnism’s intellectual mystique that so profoundly conditioned Venetian sensibility. As Bottari (1963) and other later scholars (Camesasca 1987, Tempestini 1992) have demonstrated, the Masp’s work is the prototype for several copies, versions, and derivations, among which are remembered those by Francesco da Santa Croce (Vicenza, Museo Civico), Filippo Mazzola and Rocco Marconi (both in Sarasota, Ringling Museum), Bernardino Licinio (Berenson 1958, g. 839), and Antonello de Saliba (Berlin, destroyed in 1945). Moreover, two other copies are known –one at the Art Institute of Chicago– plus Bellini variants, such as the Madonna degli Alberetti, 1487, of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice (n. 596) and the Morelli Madonna, of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. These variants by the master himself open the debate on the dating of the Masp’s panel. In 1916, the work was published for the rst time by Berenson, who dated it “at the beginning of 1488”. Since then, several scholars, among them Gronau, Dussler, Heinemann, Bottari, Pignatti, Lucco, Camesasca, and Tempestini, have proposed dates that oscillate between c.1480 and 1500. For Tempestini, for example, it dates back from before 1485; while a date around 1487-1488, as proposed by Berenson, has been preferred by a good number of historians, such as Pignatti, Lucco, Bottari, and Camesasca. Finally, Gronau, Dussler, and Heinemann plump for a later date in the last decade of the century.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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