Die Jungfrau in Herrlichkeit mit Heiligen

By 1510 Giovanni Bellini was around 80 and had been Venice's leading painter for half a century. Four years earlier the young German Albrecht Dürer, visiting the city, wrote home that Bellini was very old but still the best of them all. This altarpiece comes from those last years. Bellini set the Virgin lifted in glory above a ring of saints, painted for a convent church on Murano, the glassmakers' island across the lagoon. The gold light and the calm, weighed faces are the manner he had spent a lifetime refining. The panel has never travelled well. Its ground reacts to the lagoon's damp, so today it rests flat in the Accademia's stores rather than on a wall.