St. Anthony

This tall, narrow panel was almost certainly never meant to stand on its own. Its shape suggests it once flanked a larger altarpiece, a single saint set beside a central Madonna, before it was separated and went its own way. The figure is Anthony the Great, the Egyptian hermit who withdrew into the desert around the year 300 and became the model for the Christian monks who came after him. Bellini painted him in Venice in the 1470s, just as painters there were taking up oil paint in place of the older egg tempera, a shift that let them build the deep, quiet shadow that gathers around a solitary figure like this one. Today it hangs in the Louvre on long-term loan, one panel from a whole that no longer survives.