Works by Palma Vecchio

Palma Vecchio came from Serina near Bergamo, but his recorded career was all in or near Venice, where he painted idealized beauties at half length, pastoral mythologies and the Virgin among saints in open landscape.

Golden hair, worn loose or in thick crimped coils, and wide silks mark the half-length women in La Bella, A Blonde Woman and Young Woman in blue Gown with Feather. People in his own day already wondered whether such idealized beauties portrayed Venice's courtesans, and they still do. The ledge under La Bella's hand is carved with the letters AMB and ND.

He worked the sacra conversazione into a wide format with landscape behind. In The Virgin and Child with Saints and a Donor the saints sit close round the Virgin, and a man in black kneels under her outstretched hand.

Resting Venus, dated 1518, stretches across a grassy bank with buildings on a hill behind her, and the Bathing Nymphs of 1527 crowd round a dark pool. In Jacob and Rachel the pair kiss in a pasture full of sheep and cattle, a dog at their feet.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, National Gallery. Portrait: Georgi Giovanni.