Altar de São Vicente Ferrer

This was Giovanni Bellini's first big public commission, painted for the Venetian basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in the later 1460s, and it still stands on the same altar today. The saint in the centre, Vincent Ferrer, was a Spanish Dominican preacher who had been made a saint only in 1455, within living memory, and his order was busy spreading his cult. Bellini flanked him with two protectors the Venetians leaned on in hard times: Saint Christopher, who carried the Christ child across a river, and Saint Sebastian, prayed to against plague. A lunette of God the Father once crowned the whole structure but has since been lost. Bellini was still a young man here, decades before he became the painter who taught Giorgione and Titian.