Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano

Giovanni Battista Cima came from Conegliano, a small town in the hills north of Venice, and he never really left it behind. When he moved to Venice around 1492 and began painting altarpieces for its churches, he kept setting his sacred figures against wide, luminous landscapes, with the hills and little hilltop castles of his native countryside rising softly in the distance.

He worked in the shadow of Giovanni Bellini, the master who dominated Venetian painting in those years, and shared Bellini's gift for quiet, glowing colour and still, tender faces. Cima was also remarkably productive: more than 30 of his altarpieces survive, more than for any other Venetian painter of his generation.

He was among the first Italian painters to treat the landscape behind a religious scene as something worth studying in its own right, working out how light falls across distance and how the air itself softens far-off hills. One of his best-known works still stands on the high altar of Conegliano cathedral, in the town where he was born and where he died around 1517.