If any twentieth century artist’s work embodied the beauty of simplicity, it was Giorgio Morandi’s. Known for his still life and landscape paintings, the Italian artist helped usher in a new period of minimalism after completing more than 1300 paintings over his career. He perfected his art on a similar set of bottles and vases, creating a soothing sense of balance that few artists have mastered. You can see some of Giorgio Morandi’s most classic work on the Google Cultural Institute.

Like Morandi might have wanted, Doodler Kevin Laughlin chose a simple composition for today’s Doodle, striving to emulate the painter’s compositional style and characteristically formal placement of objects in the frame. After settling on a proper arrangement of bottles and jars that would evoke the Google logo, Kevin dusted off his glass palette in a vain attempt to pay tribute to those tactile qualities of corporeal paint that Morandi’s paintings were known for.