Pietà

Bellini was still a young man, in his late twenties or so, when he painted this around 1460. Across the stone parapet at the bottom he wrote a line of Latin adapted from the Roman poet Propertius, which says roughly that if these swelling eyes could give out sighs, then Bellini's own work would weep. It is a bold thing for a painter to write beneath a picture, a claim that paint could do what poetry does and stir real grief. He tries to earn it above the words. The dead Christ is held upright by his mother and by John, their faces pressed close to his, the flesh grey and heavy. Behind them a low horizon of fields and a distant town keeps the scene in the ordinary daylit world.