Mary with Child and Saints

Giovanni Bellini, the grand old man of Venetian painting, died in 1516, and in his late work he had tried something new with a familiar subject. A sacra conversazione, the Virgin and Child with saints gathered round them, was normally set inside a church, the figures ranked beneath an apse. Bellini took the gathering outdoors.

Palma, who worked close to Bellini's circle and to Titian, picked up that idea around 1520 to 1522 and pushed it further in this wide panel, almost two metres across. The meeting takes place in open country, and the saints are shown full-length, with what the Kunsthistorisches Museum calls a humanised manner. A scene that had been ordered by strict rank becomes intimate, almost worldly. On the left are Catherine and Celestine, a less familiar figure in Venetian altarpieces, and on the right John the Baptist and Barbara.