Styling a Colorblocked Outfit for SIA Bellini

Marsha at Marsha in the Middle is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected the circa 1490 painting "Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist" by Giovanni Bellini (or the workshop of Bellini at any rate; Marsha says it's possible that Bellini himself never touched it with his paintbrush). She chose this one because she found the colorful cherubim in the background very interesting, a "fun take" on the subject. The painting hangs in the Clowes Pavilion of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where she is a docent.

Source: marshainthemiddle.com

While the brightly-colored cherubim offer some interesting rainbow possibilities in creating an outfit, I went with a more straightforward, almost literal interpretation, inspired by the colors and layers of Mary's outfit. While August is a warm time for layering, I couldn't resist seeing how I could replicate it from my closet. It wasn't clear to me whether her dress is red or pink so I split the difference with a magenta T-shirt. My t-shirt weight cardigan in cerulean blue worked as a substitute for her blue robe. And I pulled a gauzy white scarf from my collection to represent her drapey white head covering.

I wore the t-shirt and cardigan with a new pair of knee length shorts (this style of shorts that fall right below the kneecap are often called "skimmers") that I purchased last month. Remember how I had planned to do a clothing No Buy year in 2025? Well, one thing I discovered after leaving my job at the end of June was that my wardrobe was lacking in shorts options. I wore a lot of skirts for work during the summer (both during my work from home era and my earlier in office era) so my shorts/capri pants supply for my new more casual lifestyle was limited.

And after chafing myself from wearing too-tight exercise capris (that go back to 2014 or earlier and were no longer the right size) in the heat, I was not interested in donning even casual skirts/dresses with my usual pair of bike shorts underneath due to the whole "bike shorts put pressure on this area and makes it hurt" factor. So I did a bit of shopping for looser shorts (more on this in a later post) that included this pair of stretchy skimmers in a medium denim color.

Although Mary was wearing a dress in the painting, I'm sure she would see the practicality of pants/shorts as the mom of a baby (even one as well-behaved as we can assume Jesus was), so I didn't think she'd be offended that I took the opportunity to wear my new pair for the first time in this SIA challenge.

OOTD 8/24/25

I didn't want to attempt any elaborate scarf-as-head-covering construction, so I just wore the white scarf loose around my neck; I think this works OK since Mary's scarf drapes down as well. That left an open section of magenta T-shirt that begged to be filled with a necklace, so I popped on a silver necklace from Fire Mountain Gems that has a bunch of variously-sized rings connected to each other...which doesn't really connect to anything specific in the artwork except maybe the round shapes of the cherubim heads? I did like how the brightness of the silver-tone metal looked next to the white scarf. The overall impact of this magenta/blue/white colorblocked combination is much higher contrast than my own coloring, but I did like the drama of it. Full disclosure: I did later remove both the scarf and the cardigan because it got warm in the kitchen where I spent time preparing food for the week, and wearing a long drapey white scarf felt like asking for trouble.

For my all-DIY daily bracelet stack, I started with a paper bead bracelet set that I made to coordinate with a navy, pink, and blue floral cardigan in my wardrobe (shown below). I don't have a set specifically in blue, white, and pink/magenta, though perhaps I should make one because I do love this color combination! But I thought I thought this set with the supplemental bracelets in various shades of pink made a good stack for my outfit. I can show you the paper-to-bead details for the two bicone paper beads but didn't photograph the paper for the tube beads (which was just a catalog page of clothing with light pink hearts on dark pink background). {stretch bracelet tutorial} {bicone paper bead tutorial} {tube paper bead tutorial}

The top bracelet was made from this full-page illustration of a woman on the seashore, which has beautiful deep blue and dark pink tones. This was an easy cut strips, edge in silver marker, and roll/glue situation that created gorgeous beads with a wonderful depth of color. The silver stripes from the marker look great against the dark beads.

The bottom bracelet started out as this page from a Lands End catalog with a bright pink t-shirt against a light blue and white sky. I added some pink marker to cover the peachy areas of the hands since that was not part of my color palette. Because the paper is a photo image with shadows, the rolled beads have a lovely variegated look within the colorblocking rather than merely one shade of pink. This is one thing I like so much about using magazine/catalog paper as my source rather than scrapbooking paper.

I made these bead soup earrings to coordinate with the paper bead bracelet set and its inspiration floral cardigan. Yes, I'm once again doing the dead simple "beads on a stick" style, but when you love the beads, nothing fancy is necessary to get a nice result. I mixed several types of beads here - metal, clay heishi, glass, and wood beads. I think the heishi beads (the flat little disks) added nice pops of color on the stack.

Now for my favorite part of the Style Imitating Art posts: choosing our Rabbit Imitating Art! Because the painting features two babies, I thought it only fitting to find a young bunny for this artwork. Obviously people don't bring literal baby rabbits (kits) to the state fair, but you do sometimes see young rabbits competing in the junior age category. This handsome little guy is a black Dutch "junior buck" (male under 6 months) who was quite happy to join the artwork.

When Buck Jr. hopped up into the painting, both Mary and John noticed immediately. John gazed rapturously upon this visitor with his hands held over his heart. Jesus looked at John like - What's going on with you, man? Mary lowered her eyes with a certain amount of resignation, thinking - Great, another little boy to take care of. Buck Jr.'s eagerness turned to wariness as he caught on to the identity of the participants - Mary and Jesus, OK, I don't think I have anything to worry about there, but if this is the famous John the Baptist, he might try to give me a bath, and I don't want that! I promise, I am self-cleaning! Meanwhile, the cherubim looked red with anger, green with envy, yellow with cowardice, and blue with sadness.

Artwork "improved" with rabbit

Thanks for joining me today for this Style Imitating Art + Rabbit Imitating (and Improving) Art post!

To see other outfit interpretations of this artwork, check out the review on Marsha in the Middle.

How would you have interpreted this artwork into an outfit? Would you focus on Mary? Or the cherubim? (Or maybe you dressed like baby Jesus in the shower this morning and checked it off your to-do list.) Do you like wearing outfits consisting of different solid colored pieces (or do you tend to include prints in your looks, as I usually do)? Do you prefer high, medium, or low contrast in your outfits, or is this something you don't really care about? What do you think the brightly colored cherubim are about in this painting?

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