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Giovanni Bellini ran the most important painter's workshop in Venice for the better part of six decades, and two of the students who passed through it, Giorgione and Titian, went on to define the next generation of Venetian art. Both men later surpassed the reputation of the master who trained them, something Bellini seems to have accepted without much fuss, judging by how long they stayed welcome in his circle.

What Bellini actually changed was technique. Venice painted largely in tempera through most of the 15th century, but Bellini adopted oil paint early and used its slow drying time to build up thin, translucent layers of color, letting light seem to come from inside the paint rather than sit on its surface. Skies, water, and the folds of a robe all picked up a softness earlier Venetian painters hadn't managed, and that atmospheric quality became the signature of the whole Venetian school for a century after him.

He came from a family of painters, the son of Jacopo Bellini and brother of Gentile Bellini, and worked into his eighties, still active when he died in Venice in December 1516.