Saint Justina

Giovanni Bellini painted this Saint Justina around 1470, still in tempera, before the oil technique that would soon transform Venetian painting reached him. Justina was a young Christian of Padua, put to death for her faith in Roman times, and Bellini gives her the sword that killed her and the palm that marks a martyr. What catches the eye is how little she looks like a mere symbol. Her face has the particular set of a real person, as if drawn from someone he knew, and behind her the low horizon and soft summer clouds are the flat country of the Veneto, observed rather than invented. The panel was commissioned by the Borromeo family, and today it hangs in a bedroom of the Bagatti Valsecchi house in Milan, among the Renaissance things two brothers gathered there in the 1880s.