Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Pear, c.1488, in which the Virgin and Child appear in front of a watered-silk cloth-of-honour, is one of the paintings analysed in terms of the drapery by Paul Hills, Professor Emeritus of Renaissance Art at the Courtauld Institute, in Veiled Presence: Body and drapery from Giotto to Titian (Yale, £45 (£40.50); 978-0-300-23675-0). Hills studies the Christian symbolism of veils, including swaddling and shrouds, renewed in this period of art, and explores how drapery both clothes the person and composes the picture