Agony in the Garden

This is one of the earliest paintings in European art where the light is genuinely the light of dawn. Bellini made it around 1459, in Venice, at the very start of his long career. The scene is the night before the Crucifixion. Christ kneels on the hill praying while Peter, James, and John sleep on the rocks below, and off in the distance Judas is already leading soldiers up the path to arrest him. What holds it together is the sky. A cold pink is just beginning to catch the undersides of the clouds, and Christ's tunic takes up the same tone, so the coming day and the coming ordeal arrive at once. Bellini's brother-in-law Mantegna painted almost the same scene, and both likely began from a drawing by Bellini's father.