Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror

Bellini was an old man when he signed this in 1515, near the end of a career that had run for over half a century, and you can feel him keeping pace with painters young enough to be his students. The soft warm light on the skin is something he had absorbed from Giorgione, a generation younger, who had died a few years earlier. Notice the two mirrors. One is on the wall behind the woman and one is in her hand, and between them Bellini shows you the back of her head and her face at the same time, a trick only a painting can pull off. On a small slip of paper he wrote his name using a phrase borrowed from Apelles, the most famous painter of the ancient world, whose works survived only as descriptions in Pliny. It is among the last things Bellini ever painted.