The Agony in the Garden by Giovanni Bellini

The Agony in the Garden by Giovanni Bellini

Dawn over the Mount of Olives

Christ kneels on a spur of rock with his back to us, facing a small angel who appears in a cloud holding a chalice — the cup he has asked to be spared. Below him Peter, James and John have fallen asleep in the attitudes of exhausted men. Across the valley, still distant, a line of soldiers is coming out of the city with Judas at their head. Bellini has put the whole story in one frame: the prayer, the failure of the friends, the betrayal already on its way.

The first light

What makes the picture is the sky. The sun is not yet up, and the horizon is banded with the pale reds and golds of first light, which catch the edges of the clouds and the tops of the hills. It is among the earliest paintings anywhere to make a particular time of day its subject.

A conversation with Mantegna

Bellini’s brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna painted the same subject at about the same time, and both pictures now hang in the National Gallery in London. Mantegna’s is harder and more sculptural; Bellini’s is softer and turns on light. Seeing them together is one of the best lessons in how two great painters can take the same instruction and arrive somewhere entirely different.

Where it hangs

The panel is in the National Gallery in London and measures 81 by 127 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 6,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 40 inches on its longest side.

Sources: National Gallery, London · Wikidata Q1131110 · Wikimedia Commons