The story
A few steps from the Rialto Bridge, on a narrow Venetian street, the small church of San Giovanni Grisostomo keeps two altarpieces painted only a few years apart, one by an old master near the end of his life and one by a young painter about to leave the city.
The older man was Giovanni Bellini. His Saints Christopher, Jerome and Louis of Toulouse is signed and dated 1513, when he was around 80. The merchant Giorgio Diletti had commissioned it back in 1494, and nobody knows why almost twenty years passed before it was painted. Instead of the usual enthroned Madonna, Saint Jerome sits reading high on a rock, with a landscape opening behind him through an arch, while Christopher and the bishop Louis stand below.
Over the high altar is Sebastiano del Piombo's Saint John Chrysostom with six saints, painted around 1510 and 1511, just before the young Venetian left for Rome, where he would later work closely with Michelangelo. The church around them was rebuilt from 1497 by Mauro Codussi, one of Venice's leading early Renaissance architects, and a side chapel holds a marble relief of the Coronation of the Virgin by the sculptor Tullio Lombardo.
