Pietà con la Madonna e san Giovanni Evangelista

This is early Bellini, painted in tempera around 1455 when he was a young man still working close to his father's Venice workshop. The dead Christ is held upright between his mother and John the Evangelist, pressed so near the front of the panel that the three heads almost reach into the viewer's own space. It is one of the first paintings Bellini signed as his own rather than the shop's, and the idea took hold of him. Over the following decades he returned to this exact motif again and again, the supported dead Christ between two mourners, until it became one of the images most tied to his name. Here at the start the handling is still firm and sculptural, the grief held very quiet.