The ''Madonna of the Small Trees'' (Italian: ''Madonna degli Alberetti'') is an

oil-on-panel A panel painting is a painting made on a flat panel of wood, either a single piece or a number of pieces joined together. Until canvas became the more popular support medium in the 16th century, panel painting was the normal method, when not paint ...

painting by Italian Renaissance artist

Giovanni Bellini Giovanni Bellini (; c. 1430 – 26 November 1516) was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. He was raised in the household of Jacopo Bellini, formerly thought to have been his father ...

, executed in 1487. It is housed in the

Gallerie dell'Accademia The Gallerie dell'Accademia is a museum gallery of pre-19th-century art in Venice, northern Italy. It is housed in the Scuola della Carità on the south bank of the Grand Canal, within the sestiere of Dorsoduro. It was originally the gallery o ...

Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...

. Stylistic elements, such as the division of the background, suggest that the work was based on Bellini's '' Alzano Madonna'' in the "

Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo The Accademia Carrara, (), officially Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo, is an art gallery and an academy of fine arts in Bergamo, in Lombardy in northern Italy. The art gallery was established in about 1780 by , a Bergamasco collect ...

Description

The background behind the Madonna and Child includes a hanging tapestry, a typical element of contemporary

sacred conversation In art, a (; plural: ''sacre conversazioni''), meaning holy (or sacred) conversation, is a genre developed in Italian Renaissance painting, with a depiction of the Virgin and Child (the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus) amidst a group of sain ...

s and which also appears in the ''Alzano Madonna''. At the sides are two portions of landscape with two slender trees, whence the traditional name of the picture. In the lower foreground, as usual in Bellini works, is a parapet in green marble with his signature.

References

* {{Giovanni Bellini Small Trees 1487 paintings Collections of the Accademia Carrara Nude art

Description

See also

References