The Virgin and Child with Saints Cecilia and Ursula

Whereas Bellini’s Madonnas are pensive and slightly melancholy, Carpaccio’s main figure group combines aristocratic refinement with a genre-like intimacy. The Child appears as a real human baby, clutching a piece of fruit in his chubby fist and dressed as an infant member of the Venetian patrician class. His mother, with her embroidered veil, robe and mantle hemmed with a pseudo-Cufic script that alludes to worldly luxury, gazes down on him with an expression of gentle solitude. The princess-like saints similarly combine feminine tenderness with sartorial richness. Compared to the somewhat remote character of Bellini’s Madonnas, those of Carpaccio appear undeniably secular. The picture was almost certainly a work of private devotion, presumably intended for a bedroom rather than for the more solemn surroundings of a church, so the informal, spontaneous approach was likely adopted in order to render its pious message more vivid to the original owners.

The identity of the two saints in this painting is not absolutely clear. The saint on the left, holding her palm of martyrdom and wearing a crown of roses, is almost certainly Cecilia, who was shown with a very similar crown in the celebrated altarpiece by Antonello da Messina for the Venetian church of San Cassiano, of which she was cotitular. The saint on the right, whose crown and coiffure are richly decorated with jewels, is probably the princess Ursula, who, as depicted by Carpaccio in his Life of Saint Ursula cycle, suffered martyrdom by being shot with arrows. It may be suggested that the present intimate panel was painted for one of her devotees involved in the commission of the cycle.

Often considered second only to Giovanni Bellini as the outstanding Venetian painter of his generation, Vittore Carpaccio was once a student of Bellini’s younger brother, Gentile. Influenced by the style of Antonello da Messina and Early Netherlandish artists, Carpaccio had a taste for anecdote and eye for the crowded detail of the Venetian scene. This is particularly evident in his scenes from the Life of Saint Ursula, the first of the two great cycles of paintings for which he became known. The nineteenth century art critic John Ruskin described his work as ‘the sweetest, because the truest, of all that Venice was born to utter: the painted syllabling of it is nearly the last word and work of hers in true life’.[2] In the present panel, the delicate Virgin is far removed from the voluptuous feminine ideal of various High Renaissance Madonnas by such artists as Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian. Intrinsic to Carpaccio’s artistic style is the hard, clear, chiseled quality of the forms and the precisely controlled draftsmanship of a kind that even the older Giovanni Bellini had by this date abandoned for a broader, softer type of handling.