The Calvary

Christ hangs against a wide, gentle countryside - a river winding past a walled town, blue hills, a clear sky - with only the grieving Virgin and Saint John below (John 19:25-27) and skulls marking Golgotha, 'the place of the skull.' Early Bellini already shows what would define Venetian painting: feeling carried less by gesture than by light and air, the restrained sorrow of the two figures answered by the calm of the land. Compare Antonello da Messina's Crucifixion elsewhere in this collection, nearly the same design - the Sicilian's visit to Venice, and Bellini's response to it, remade painting in the city.