Works by Giovanni Bellini

Giovanni Bellini started out in the old tempera method and gradually made more use of oil, and his religious pictures show both ways of painting.

He grew up in the house of Jacopo Bellini, long taken for his father, though that is now questioned, and worked closely with Gentile Bellini, his brother or perhaps his nephew. His brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna, and the early pictures are often tied to Mantegna's. The Agony in the Garden, in tempera from around 1458–60, sets Christ praying on a rock above three disciples asleep on the ground while soldiers file along the river path behind, under a sky turning pink at the horizon.

Oil, brought to Venice by Antonello da Messina about 1473, let him blend colours and grade tones into atmosphere. In the Madonna del Prato, from about 1500–05, Mary sits on open ground with the child asleep across her knees, while cattle stand by a fence, a crow perches in a bare tree and a walled town catches the sun. On his visit in 1506, Albrecht Dürer called him very old, yet still the best painter.

Several portraits show a sitter head and shoulders behind a stone ledge carrying the signature, set against blue: Doge Leonardo Loredan in silver-white brocade, a young man in black under a square cap. Giorgione and Titian trained with him. Sacred and mythological subjects take up most of the works below, many of them the Virgin with the child, alongside portraits and a few drawings.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, National Gallery, National Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts.