O Batismo de Cristo

In the Jubilee year 1500 a Vicenza man named Battista Garzadori made the long pilgrimage to the Holy Land and stood at the river Jordan, where John had baptised Christ. He vowed that if he got home safely he would build a chapel to mark it, and he did, in the church of Santa Corona, with this altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini at its centre. So the subject is personal, the very river he had reached. Bellini, by then an old man, wrapped the figures in a soft even light that ties the water, the hills and the sky into one atmosphere. He signed his name, Ioannes Bellinus, on the face of a rock at the lower left.