Giovanni Bellini

Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516) was born in Venice, trained in the workshop of his father Jacopo Bellini, and died in the city he had spent nearly nine decades transforming. He worked in Padua and Pesaro as well as Venice, and by the end of his life had made the Venetian altarpiece into something distinct from anything in Florence or Rome. What he contributed was light. Bellini treated colour as the carrier of feeling rather than as decoration over drawing, and the soft, saturated atmosphere of his late Madonnas set the terms for Venetian painting for a century. That influence is not a matter of inference: Giorgione and Titian both came out of his studio. Seven of his works are in this collection, including Christ Blessing, the Drunkenness of Noah and Madonnas with attendant saints — a span covering both the intimate devotional panel and the ambitious narrative subject.