Pietà

Around 1470 Giovanni Bellini painted this dead Christ held upright by four small angels for a church in Rimini, on Italy's Adriatic coast. The panel was probably ordered by Rainerio Migliorati, a humanist scholar who advised the Malatesta, the family then ruling the town. Bellini was still young, and you can feel him testing how much sorrow a still, quiet picture can carry — Christ's body pale and heavy, the angels too small to really bear its weight, grief doing the lifting instead. For centuries it hung in the church of San Francesco before passing to the town's own museum. It was cleaned and restored only recently, after some 70 years, and briefly traveled to New York.