Il festino degli dei

Giovanni Bellini finished this in 1514, in his eighties, the last great work of a very long career, for the duke Alfonso d'Este, who wanted a room of mythological feasts for his private study in Ferrara. The gods have come down to earth and are picnicking in a wood, drinking, one of them about to misbehave with a sleeping nymph. But the picture you are looking at is not entirely Bellini's. After he died in 1516, the duke kept adding to the room, and the young Titian was brought in to make this panel match the wilder pictures around it. Around 1529 Titian repainted much of the landscape, replacing the gentle trees behind the figures with the steep blue rock you now see on the left. Modern examination has traced exactly where one master's brush ends and the other's begins.