[7] The "Gypsy Madonna" is a 19th-century name for the painting, because of the Virgin's supposed "dusky complexion and her dark hair and eyes," she was seen as resembling a Romani woman.

She seems young even by the standards of Madonnas, and the hands of the Child are unusually engaged, respectively with his mother's fingers and her dress (this is a difference to the Bellini).

No picture before this attains a comparable sense of presences existing palpably within an atmosphere, reflecting coloured light but also absorbing it to saturation point, so that each pore of flesh or drapery makes texture.

[9] Despite the debts to Bellini and Giorgione, the painting shows Titian, who was then around twenty-one, developing his own independent character and style.

Unlike Bellini's usual careful underdrawing, Titian "used as his guidelines only summary strokes made with a fairly wide brush with thin wash shading".