Madonna of the Meadow
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
The Child sleeping across her lap is lying in the pose of the Lamentation — the dead Christ laid on his mother's knees. The National Gallery says contemporaries would have caught it at once. Her hands are folded in prayer over him, not holding him.
Behind, the ordinary day goes on: oxen rubbing heads, a herder pacing his land, a castle in the light. In one bare tree a vulture waits. Spring has reached everything but that branch.
The Gallery calls the vulture a foreboding symbol of death. What a vulture waits for is asleep in her lap.
Sources: The National Gallery, London, Giovanni Bellini, 'The Madonna of the Meadow', NG599. · Brian D. Steele, ‘Giovanni Bellini's Madonna of the Meadow, Meditational Poesia, and the Imitatio Christi’, Paragone Past and Present 2, no. 1 (2021), 3–29. DOI 10.1163/24761168-00201001
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 18,621 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.