Thronende Madonna mit Kind, Heiligen und Engeln

Venice in the mid-1480s was living under the shadow of plague, and the men who commissioned this altarpiece for the church of San Giobbe were a confraternity devoted to the sick and dying. That is why Job stands here, stripped and patient, the Old Testament figure who kept his faith through suffering, beside Saint Sebastian, whose arrows made him the protector people prayed to against the disease. Bellini set the whole scene inside a shadowed apse crowned with gold mosaic, echoing the real architecture of the Venetian church so the painted space seemed to open out of the wall itself. At the foot of the throne, three angels play a lute and other instruments, a small pocket of music in a picture made in a year of fear. The gold in the half dome is meant to catch the light of real candles once set before it.