Virgin and Child

Virgin and Child, at the Ca' d'Oro in Venice, is a devotional panel by the Venetian painter Alvise Vivarini, nephew of the more famous Antonio Vivarini and active in the final decades of the fifteenth century. The Ca' d'Oro—the Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal housing the Franchetti collection—is an appropriate home for a panel that represents the continuation of the Venice-Padua devotional tradition into which Alvise was born. His work shows the transition from the harder, more linear style of his family's workshop toward the softer handling influenced by Giovanni Bellini.

The Madonna and Child are presented in a three-quarter bust format common to Venetian devotional panels, the Virgin's blue mantle rendered in carefully layered ultramarine glazes. The Child's movement—reaching toward his mother or turning toward the viewer—is given slightly more naturalistic animation than the stiff frontality of earlier Vivarini workshop production.