St. Augustine

Around 1470 Giovanni Bellini was the leading painter of a Venice just beginning to soften its edges. His brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna had taught the family a hard, sculptural line, every fold cut as if in stone, and in these years Bellini was quietly loosening it toward warmer light and rounder form, a few years before oil painting fully took hold in the city. This tall narrow panel of Saint Augustine, one of the great teachers of the early Church shown here in a bishop's robes, was never meant to stand alone. Panels this shape were the wings of an altarpiece, a row of saints around a central Madonna, later taken apart and dispersed. Augustine now keeps his place at the Louvre without the neighbours he was painted to stand among.