How To Read Paintings: Bellini’s San Zaccaria Altarpiece

The decoding of a Venetian masterpiece

Detail from ‘San Zaccaria Altarpiece’ (1505) by Giovanni Bellini (c.1430–1516). Source Wikiart

There are few places like Venice. With its lagoons and waterways that shimmer under a brilliant Adriatic light, with its buildings and sometimes stinking water (that always makes me think of the pestilence in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice), the city is a landscape transformed like no other.