Transfiguration of Christ

This is Bellini's second attempt at the subject, painted around 1478, and the distance from his first try is the whole story. He had begun under the spell of his brother-in-law Mantegna, all hard rock and cutting line. Here Christ stands transfigured on a low hill with Moses and Elijah beside him and three dazzled apostles fallen at the front, but the eye keeps drifting to the country behind them, an ordinary green Veneto of farms, fences and grazing land under a sky heavy with coming rain. Bellini plants a dead tree on one side and a living one on the other, letting the plain landscape carry the meaning of death and new life. The light is that of a real, particular afternoon.