The Circumcision of Christ

In February 1506 Albrecht Dürer, then working in Venice, wrote home that Giovanni Bellini was very old and still the best painter in the city. That was the Venice around this panel. Bellini was the man everyone measured themselves against, Giorgione was the new sensation, and Titian was about 18 with almost nothing behind him. The shape tells you what sort of job it was: roughly 79 centimetres wide and only 37 high, a long horizontal strip made for a room rather than an altar, showing the ceremony in the Temple on the eighth day of Christ's life. Yale bought it in 1871 out of the collection James Jackson Jarves had assembled in Florence, and reads both Bellini and Giorgione in the handling of the oil. The panel is damaged now, and the gallery notes that the brushwork still carries through the damage.