Saints Christopher, Jerome and Louis of Toulouse

Giovanni Bellini signed this altarpiece in 1513, an old man near the end of a very long career, who had by then taken up the softer, hazier light of a younger generation of Venetians. Oddly, a merchant named Giorgio Diletti had first ordered the picture back in 1494, and no one knows why nearly twenty years passed before Bellini finished it. He left out the enthroned Virgin you would expect above an altar and set Saint Jerome high on a rock, quietly reading, with Saint Christopher and Saint Louis of Toulouse standing below. The arch overhead carries a line of a psalm written in Greek, a nod to the Greek-speaking Venetians who worshipped in this church.