Sacra Famiglia con donatori

Carpaccio painted this in Venice around 1505, when the city was near the height of its wealth and Giovanni Bellini set the tone for every painter in it. It is a votive picture. The Holy Family gathers on one side, and on the other two donors in expensive clothes kneel to adore the Christ Child at the centre, their faces given real, particular features rather than a generic piety. Behind them a made-up landscape opens out, with the three Magi already riding in toward the scene from the distance. Four centuries later the panel entered the collection of Calouste Gulbenkian, the Armenian oil financier whose paintings now fill a museum built for them in Lisbon.