c. 1505, 402*273cm, Oil on wood
Venetian painters, it seems, did not think of colour as an
additional adornment for the picture after it had been drawn
on the panel. When one enters the little church of San Zaccaria in Venice and stands before the picture, which the great
Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini (1431?~1516) painted over
the altar there in 1505 - in his old age - one immediately notices that his approach to colour was very different. It is the
mellowness and richness of the colours that impress one before one even begins to look at what the picture represents. I
think that even the photograph conveys something of the w
arm and gilded atmosphere which fills the niche in which the
sits enthroned, with the infant Jesus lifting His little
hands to bless the worshippers before the altar. An angel at
the foot of the altar softly plays the violin, while the saints stand quietly at either side of the throne: St Peter with his key
and book, St Catherine with the palm of martyrdom and the
broken wheel, St Lucy and St Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, and whom Bellini therefore represented as reading a book. Many Madonnas with saints have
been painted before and after, in Italy and elsewhere, but few
were ever conceived with such dignity and repose.
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