Workshop of Giovanni Bellini

Giovanni Bellini's name also worked as a trade mark. In his large Venetian workshop, assistants painted pictures from his designs and signed them with his name, and museums now separate those from his own work by how they are painted.

The Circumcision in the National Gallery in London, from about 1500, is one of them. The Christ Child sits naked on a cushion on an altar while a priest in a striped headdress performs the rite, and attendants draw back cloths like stage curtains. The design goes back to a Presentation in the Temple by Andrea Mantegna, Bellini's brother-in-law, which Bellini himself had adapted. The gallery thinks Bellini may have painted the women's faces, while the fabrics lack the texture of his own portraits.

A small Saviour in the Prado in Madrid shows how far such repetition went. It copies a signed picture of about 1495 in the Academia de San Fernando in the same city, and some twenty copies of that composition are known. The Louvre's Madonna and Child with Saints carries the signature Iohannes Bellinus on its balustrade and is still catalogued as a workshop picture.