Madonna and Child

Vittore Carpaccio

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the shins up, a woman holds a seated child in her lap below two winged baby heads and in front of a deep landscape in this vertical painting. The woman, child, and faces above all have pale skin and blond hair. The woman sits at the center of the painting with her body facing us. Her head tips slightly to our right, and she looks down and to the left with heavy-lidded eyes. She has a heart-shaped face, and her pink lips are closed. A white cloth drapes over her head and back beyond her shoulders. Her ruby-red dress is tied with a dark green, nearly black cord around the waist, and a voluminous lapis-blue robe with a coppery gold lining drapes heavily over her shoulders and covers her lap. She holds a book with a dark green cover open in her left hand, to our right, and braces the baby’s chest with her other hand. Both she and the child have delicate, gold lines creating halos. The baby’s pudgy body also faces us, and he wears only a translucent white garment that comes down to his elbows and hips. A slate-blue band is around his middle. The child looks down and to the left with light hazel eyes. He and the baby heads above have round faces, snub noses, rosy cheeks, and parted pink lips. He lightly grips the edge of the woman’s robe with his left hand, to our right, and holds the other hand up with first two fingers and thumb raised. The pair sit on a wide, maroon-red ledge or bench behind a second ledge, which runs across the bottom edge of the painting. A small bird with a tawny brown body, yellow-tipped wings, and a red, black, and white head perches on the right side of the closer ledge, near the lower right corner. A dirt path winds across a grassy area beyond the ledges. A white rabbit crouches in the distance to our left and two four-legged animals, perhaps stags, are to the right. Towns on hills along a body of water reach into the deep distance, where ice-blue mountains line the horizon about two-thirds of the way up the composition. Streaks of pale pink and yellow over the mountains deepen to blue across the top of the painting. The two baby heads are each flanked by a pair of brown and gray wings, and they float in banks of pale gray clouds.