Pietà

This is one of Giovanni Bellini's earliest surviving pictures, painted in Venice around 1460, when he was still working in the long shadow of his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna. The type was an old one, borrowed from Byzantine icons and hugely popular in Italy: the dead Christ shown upright in his tomb, close and half-length, so a worshipper could dwell on his wounds and his suffering. Bellini keeps the body pale, the arms softly folded, and sets a faint rose dawn behind the figure to catch how drained the flesh still looks. It was made for private devotion, a single quiet face held at eye level to be prayed in front of. Since the museum's postwar rebuilding it has hung in Milan's Golden Room.