Crucifixion

Bellini painted this around 1500, and it sets aside almost every convention for a Crucifixion. There are no thieves, no Roman soldiers, no weeping Mary or John. Christ hangs alone above an open landscape. Scattered in the foreground are three tombstones whose shapes and lettering mark them as Jewish, set before a walled city that Bellini assembled from real places, bits of Venice and Ancona and Vicenza fused into an ideal Jerusalem. The panel has come down in unusually good condition for its age, and botanists picking over the ground have counted around 30 different species of plant growing across it.