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Decoding a Venetian Masterpiece
A Renaissance lesson in artistic harmony
There are few places like Venice, with its lagoons and waterways that warble under the brilliant Adriatic light. Set in its maze of eloquent buildings and sometimes pungent water — that always makes me think of the pestilence in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice — the city is a landscape like no other.
Venice is also special because among its ecclesiastical wonders, you can still see paintings that hang in the setting for which they were made — as opposed to most artworks which have been relocated to art galleries or museums.
The history of Venice lives like so few other cities do.
One such painting, located in the Church of San Zaccaria, is Giovanni Bellini’s San Zaccaria Altarpiece, painted in 1505 when the artist was in his early 70s — Bellini’s exact birth year remains a matter of debate.
The Victorian art critic John Ruskin judged the painting as one of “the two best pictures in the world.”
(The other was the Madonna of the Frari Triptych, also by Bellini.)
Subtle richness
The painting is brimming with details. It shows the Virgin Mary sitting on a throne surrounded by four saints. At the Virgin’s feet, glancing out to the viewer, is an angel playing an instrument known as a lira da braccio — similar to a violin.
Behind the throne, the architectural recess is modelled in three dimensions and glows soft yellow-ochre, allowing the rest of the scene to occupy a plane that is set forward, almost crossing over into our real-world space.
The wider scheme of the San Zaccaria Altarpiece is held together by an elegant sense of space. The illusion is of an architectural apse, a small seme-circular chapel with Renaissance-style columns on either side and capped by a dome covered in Byzantine mosaics. To a viewer standing inside the church, it…
