Madonna with Saints

In February 1506 Albrecht Durer, visiting Venice from Nuremberg, wrote home that Giovanni Bellini was very old and still the best painter in the city. This altarpiece is dated the year after that, 1507, and Bellini was somewhere in his late seventies when he signed it, with Giorgione and the young Titian already at work around him. It is a sacra conversazione, the Venetian arrangement that gathers the Virgin and Child and the saints into one room instead of separate compartments. John the Baptist and Francis stand on one side, Jerome and Sebastian on the other. Kneeling among them with his hands together is Giacomo Dolfin, the patrician who paid for the chapel, which is why the picture is known in Venice as the Dolfin sacra conversazione. It is still in the church he built it for, San Francesco della Vigna.