La Présentation au Temple

The young Giovanni Bellini painted this around 1470, and he was clearly studying his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, whose own version of the same scene he follows almost figure for figure, the infant Christ brought to the old priest across a stone ledge that crowds right up to us. But where Mantegna is hard and sculptural, Bellini softens everything, the faces rounder, the light warmer. Two of the onlookers pressed in at the edges are often taken for members of the Bellini family. It is an early sign of the gentler Venetian manner he would spend the next 40 years perfecting.