Madonna con Bambino in trono con santi e donatore

Albrecht Durer arrived in Venice in 1505 and soon wrote home to Nuremberg that Giovanni Bellini was very old and still the best in painting. Bellini was about 70 and had run the busiest workshop in the city for decades. This small altarpiece carries his signature on a painted scrap of paper, the cartellino he used all his life, and the heads of the two saints are held to be his own work, while other passages came from the assistants who kept the shop running. Nobody knows who paid for it or which chapel it was made for. Peter and Paul shown at full length point to a patron with money. Some time around 1700 the panel was taken out of its original frame, which is why it now reads as a picture rather than an altar.