La Résurrection du Christ

The man who commissioned this, a Venetian named Marino Zorzi, first asked Bellini for a Virgin Mary above his tomb in the mortuary church on the island of Murano. Then, sometime before 1479, he changed his mind and told Bellini to paint the risen Christ instead. What Bellini gave him is set at the exact moment of dawn. Christ rises against a sky that is just beginning to lighten, and the whole landscape behind him is built out of that early, low sun, with rabbits, birds and a distant road catching the first light. Bellini treated the sunrise and the resurrection as the same event, one natural and one miraculous. Painters after him borrowed that idea of an open landscape carried entirely by graded daylight.