AHMANSON PRESENT : MUSEUM UNWRAPS A CHRISTMAS PAINTING

The Ahmanson Foundation has come through again this year, crowning the holiday season with a beautiful gift to the County Museum of Art. A mid-15th-Century “Madonna and Child,” painted by Venetian artist Jacopo Bellini, has taken its place in the museum’s galleries of 14th- and 15th-Century Italian paintings and sculpture.

Long tucked away in a private European collection, the little-known painting was bought a year ago at a Monte Carlo auction by a New York dealer who subsequently sold it to the Ahmanson Foundation, a Los Angeles-based charitable organization and longtime museum benefactor. The price was not revealed, but works of similar vintage and rarity have recently brought sums ranging from six figures to more than $1 million.

Though not technically a Christmas present, the oil-on-panel work (measuring about 27x18 inches) fairly glows with holiday spirit in the Christian tradition. Bellini’s moving depiction of the mother and child brings the pair together in an intimate embrace, their faces nearly touching. With the woman robed in red, the baby in green and their heads ringed by golden halos, “Madonna and Child” seems destined to be reproduced on Christmas cards.

The masterful early Renaissance work is not easily dismissed as a manifestation of holiday sentiment, however. It is far too rare and too fine to be anything other than a painting for all seasons.

In contrast to the more stylized images surrounding it at the museum, the Bellini combines a crisp black background and iconic form with believable human presence. The figures’ bodies are roundly and naturalistically modeled; their gazes are both adoring and portentous. “Mother of God” is inscribed in two roundels in upper corners, while the Madonna’s halo bears the words, “Hail Mary full of grace; the Lord is with thee.”

“He’s a real little kid and his mother is totally aware of his impending fate,” commented Scott Schaefer, curator of European paintings and sculpture. As the new acquisition awaited hanging, Schaefer fondly pointed out details in the painting--from affecting expressive qualities to the baby’s “wonderful little toes.”

Jacopo Bellini, who worked from about 1424 to 1470, headed a family of Italian artists who influenced the development of the Venetian school of painting. Trained by Gentile da Fabriano, the patriarch was the father of painters Gentile and Giovanni Bellini and the father-in-law of Andrea Mantegna.

“Madonna and Child” is one of only two paintings by Jacopo Bellini in American museums. The other, of the same subject but in relatively poor condition, according to Schaefer, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“Fifteenth-Century paintings are a rarity on the market,” Schaefer said. “They just don’t come up that often. What’s astonishing about this one is that it’s both very rare and in incredibly good condition. To find a great painting by a great artist is very unusual.”

That “Madonna and Child” has fared so well--with its modeled flesh and soft drapery so delicately intact--is probably attributable to being privately owned and unpublished, according to the curator.

“The least known paintings are often the best preserved,” he said, noting that paintings surviving for five centuries have often been reduced to the condition of drawings by repeated cleanings or insensitive conservation. For example, the museum’s only other mid-15th-Century painting, by Marco Zoppo, looks washed out when compared to the richly colored Bellini.