The Clemency of Scipio

This long, narrow strip was meant to look like carved marble, not paint. Around 1506 the Cornaro family in Venice ordered a frieze for a private study, and the commission first went to Andrea Mantegna, the great master of painting that imitates ancient stone. When Mantegna did not complete it, his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini took over and worked in the same trick, grey on grey, so the figures read as a Roman relief brought to life. The scene is usually read as a lesson in self-control from Roman history: the young general Scipio, having captured a beautiful woman, hands her back untouched to the man she was to marry. Bellini was by now an old man near the end of a very long career, painting in a manner that was really his brother-in-law's.