Giovanni Bellini, also known by his nickname Giambellino (Venice, ca. 1433 - id. November 26, 1516) was a Venetian Fourteenth-century painter, one of the most important artists of the Venetian Renaissance. He is probably the best known member of a family of Venetian painters that included his father Jacopo, his brother Gentile and his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna. He is considered an artist who revolutionized Venetian painting, progressing it towards a more sensual and colorful style. Using light, slow-drying oil paint, Giovanni created rich, intense tints and detailed shadows. His sumptuous coloring and flowing, atmospheric landscapes had a great effect on the Venetian school of painting, especially on his pupils Giorgione and Titian.
Giovanni Bellini's Biography
Although his contemporaries appreciated Giovanni Bellini as a great painter, his life is relatively poorly documented; numerous works of his of paramount importance lack definitive framing because of the paucity of certain data.
Origins
Giovanni Bellini was born in Venice, although the exact date of his birth is not known. He was the son of an established Venetian artist, Jacopo Bellini. Giorgio Vasari states that he died at the age of ninety in 1516, hence he was considered to have been born in 1426.
But the Florentine historian, in whom such errors are common in artists he did not know, is contradicted by a document from the will of Bellini's mother, the Marsicana Anna Rinversi, drawn up on the occasion of her first birth, in 1429. It is not certain whether he was the first-born of the family or not:
contemporary sources always speak of Gentile being older than Giovanni, and it could even be his sister Nicolosia (who later married Andrea Mantegna) or a fourth brother, Niccolò, discovered only in 1985 by Meyer Zu Capellen. Giovanni's date of birth would then not be in the 1920s but at least around 1432-1433, if not later.
Then there is the question of his legitimacy. Normally he is considered a natural son, born of the father out of wedlock with another woman, or of a marriage preceding Anna's, taking as a basis the document of Anna Rinversi's will of November 1471, when, already widowed by Jacopo, she disposes that her property should pass to Niccolò, Gentile and Nicolosia.
Since she does not mention Giovanni, Fiocco (1909) considered that this proved that she was another mother. This thesis is not supported by any other evidence and subsequent criticism has been cautious about it.
Giovanni Bellini's Juvenile phase
Artistic beginnings
He grew up in his father's house, in whose workshop he was initiated in the craft, together with his brothers Gentile and Niccolò. Giovanni's beginnings in art are uncertain and must be placed in the years 1445-1450, although no known work by the artist is unanimously attributed to that period.
Among the more likely candidates were a St. Jerome from the Barber Institute in Birmingham and a Crucifixion from the Museo Poldi Pezzoli. More recent criticism, however, attributes these works to the generic Venetian production of the first half of the 15th century.
Until the age of almost thirty his painting is dominated by a deep religious feeling and human pathos. His paintings of this early period are all executed in the ancient tempera method.
His work followed the example of his father's workshop and that of the Vivarini, the two most important pictorial centers of Venice at the time. To find the first certain mention of Giovanni, we have to go to a document dated April 9, 1459, when, in the presence of the Venetian notary Giuseppe Moisis, he testified that he lived alone in San Lio.
This does not mean, however, that the artist was already working alone, at least in large commissions. A testimony of Fra Valerio Polidoro in 1460 reveals that he realized, together with Jacopo and Gentile, the lost Gattamelata altarpiece for the basilica of the Saint in Padua, destined for a new chapel dedicated to Saints Bernardino and Francesco.
The Mantegnesque phase
Giovanni's early works have often been related, compositionally and stylistically, to those of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), who became his brother-in-law in 1453. To this influence he joins that of Ansuino da Forlì, with broken forms, a certain roughness in the stamp, which progressively sweetens, and a meticulous composition of the elements.
Among the first works to display these characteristics are the two panels of The Crucifixion (ca. 1455) and The Transfiguration (ca. 1455-1460) in the Correr Museum in Venice. The figures are subtly and crudely expressive, the anatomy bony, the landscape broad but minutely detailed, with dry, "rocky" lines.
The relationship with Mantegna is fully exemplified by comparing similar works, or in some cases, of identical composition. This is the case, for example, of Christ on the Mount of Olives in the National Gallery in London (ca. 1459), similar to a work of similar subject matter by Mantegna in the same museum (ca. 1455). Both derive from a drawing by Jacopo Bellini from his sketchbook now in London.
They share a livid and rarefied atmosphere, with a rocky and arid landscape, and a rather forced line. In Bellini's work, however, the colors are less dark and glazed, more natural and less "stony", and the forms are softened by curved lines, such as the polished "cushion of rock" on which Jesus kneels.
Even more evident is the comparison between the two Presentations in the Temple (ca. 1455-1460), the one by Mantegna being older than the one by Bellini. They have the same composition and characters: the Virgin and Child leaning against a marble frame in the foreground, with an old, lapsed priest coming forward to hold the child while Joseph, in the background and half hidden, looks at the scene frontally.
In Mantegna's panel the frame, a necessary resource for the usual experiments of spatial "rupture" towards the spectator, surrounds the whole painting, with two lateral figures, perhaps his self-portrait and a portrait of his wife Nicolosia, and with a reduced coloring, which makes the characters seem austere and solid as rock sculptures.
In Bellini's Presentation there are two more, including his self-portrait. He organizes the group in a different way, like a small human crowd; the cornice has given way to a more agile sill, which isolates the figures less from the viewer, and the colors, especially whites and reds, are presented with greater softness and naturalism in the flesh tones and other surfaces.
The series of the Virgins with Child
Around the year 1460 Giovanni must have begun the series of the Virgins with Child, which characterized his entire career as a theme. They are images of small or medium dimensions destined to private devotion, very abundant in the Venetian production of the 15th century.
We can mention the Madonna and Child in the Malaspina Museum in Pavia, the one in Philadelphia, the Lehman Madonna in New York and the so-called Greek Madonna in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.
These works unite influences well alive in Venice, thanks to its mercantile activity: Byzantine as seen in the iconic fixity of the divinity, and Flemish, with its analytical attention to detail.
Moreover Giovanni was influenced by the Tuscan school spread in Veneto in those years by the presence for years of Donatello in Padua (1443-1453) and the example of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), already become brother-in-law in 1453, with whom he established an intense relationship of personal and artistic exchange; with the works of his brother-in-law have often been related, compositionally and stylistically, the early works of Giovanni.
The first production of Bellini also has its own characteristics, given by "a peculiar and very sweet tension that always unites mother and child in a relationship of deep pathos".
The composition is taken from Byzantine and Cretan icons, in some cases with extreme fidelity. But the conversion of such immobile stereotypes into living and poetic figures, capable of establishing an intimate relationship with the viewer, was radical.
The Pietà series
In those years he also dealt with the theme of the Pieta, the artistic representation of the dead Christ supported by the Virgin. He did so in a different and somewhat more personal style, with less harshness in the contours and a broader treatment of the forms and clothing, but without attenuating the intensity of the religious sentiment.
This iconography was also inspired by Byzantine models: the imago pietatis. The prototypes of the series are the Pietà of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the one in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, dating from the fifties and sixties; they were followed by the dead Christ held by two angels in the Museo Correr, influenced by Mantegna, the famous Pietà in the Pinacoteca di Brera (ca. 1465-1470) and the one in Rimini (ca. 1474).
Giovanni Bellini's Artistic maturity
Between 1464 and 1470 Giovanni found himself involved with his father's workshop in the execution of four large triptychs for the recently rebuilt church of Santa Maria della Carità in Venice. These are the triptychs dedicated to St. Lawrence, St. Sebastian, the Virgin Mary and the Nativity, which were dismantled and recomposed in the Napoleonic era before entering the Accademia Gallery, attributed to the Vivarini, where they are today.
They are interesting works, but their execution is today largely attributed to other personalities, while the overall project is the work of Jacopo Bellini. Among the four, the most autograph of Giovanni is the Triptych of St. Sebastian.
The polyptych of St. Vincent Ferrer
The Triptych of St. Sebastian is considered a kind of general test for his first great work as a painter, the Polyptych of St. Vincent Vincent Ferrer (1464-1468). It was executed for the homonymous chapel of the basilica of San Zanipolo in Venice. He painted nine compartments arranged in three registers, on which was present as a crowning also a lost lunette with the Eternal Father.
The saints of the central register are characterized by a strong plastic mechanism, underlined by the grandeur of the figures, the emphatic lines of the anatomies and the clothes, the brilliant use of the light that radiates from the lower part towards some details, such as the face of St. Christopher.
The space is dominated by the distant landscape on the background and the depth in perspective suggested by a few elements, such as the foreshortened arrows of St. Sebastian or the long staff of St. Christopher.
In 1470 Giovanni received his first appointment to work with his brother and other artists at the Scuola di San Marco, where among other subjects he was commissioned to paint a Flood with Noah's ark.
None of the master's works of this type have survived. Most of Giovanni's major public commissions have been lost. There was a famous altarpiece painted in tempera for a chapel in the church of St. John and St. Paul, which disappeared in a fire in 1867, along with Titian's St. Peter Martyr and Tintoretto's Crucifixion.
To the decade after 1470 must probably be assigned the Transfiguration (on the right) now preserved in the Naples museum, repeating with greater maturity and in a more serene spirit the subject matter of his earlier efforts in Venice.
The Pesaro Altarpiece
The famous altarpiece dedicated to the Coronation of the Virgin, possibly from 1475, ([2]), executed for the Church of San Francesco in Pesaro and now in the local municipal museum, carried Bellini's influence on non-Venetian painters, such as Marco Palmezzano of Forlì.
It seems to be his earliest effort in an art form previously almost monopolized in Venice by the rival school of the Vivarini. In this work the influences of Piero della Francesca can be seen: Giovanni Bellini moves away from his father's style and overcomes the traces of late Gothic. He synthesizes color with form and unifies objects and other figurative beings in the same space.
With this altarpiece Giovanni reaches his style of maturity and full Renaissance imposition with the rectangular shape, originally crowned by a Pietà that today is in the Vatican Pinacoteca.
The large central panel depicting a Coronation of the Virgin marks the achievement of a new balance, where the lessons of Mantegna are sublimated by a clear light in the style of Piero della Francesca.
The compositional imposition follows the schemes of some funerary monuments of the time, but also records the extraordinary invention of the painting within the painting, with the trellis of the throne of Jesus and Mary that opens like a cornice, framing a landscape that seems a reduction, by dimensions, light and style, of the same altarpiece inside itself.
Here the first influences of Antonello da Messina, who arrived in Venice in 1475, also come together, introducing to the city the use of oil painting, the union of the love of Flemish detail and the Italian sense of form and unitary composition, as well as the prevalence of light.
The portraits
The liberation of color and light that he achieves in his Virgins, also appears in his portraits whose background landscapes realistically represent nature. Giovanni Bellini shows nature animated by human work, or sometimes also still, or stopped, surrounded by great chromatic and luminous variety.
At the same time as the vast production of sacred art, Bellini devoted himself at least until the end of the seventies to the realization of intense portraits that, although few in number, were extremely significant in their results. T
he earliest documented is the Portrait of Jörg Fugger of 1474, followed by Portrait of a Young Man in Red and Portrait of a Condotiero, both in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. The influence of Antonello da Messina is evident, but Giovanni's works are distinguished by a less obvious psychological relationship between the sitter and the viewer, toned in a less direct and more formal dialogue.
In 1479 his brother Gentile left for Constantinople to work for Sultan Mehmed II, so Giovanni took his place in the execution of the frescoes of the Venetian Doge's Palace, which were to be destroyed in 1577 by fire. After 1479-1480 much of Giovanni's time and energy were consumed by his duties as conservator of the paintings in the great hall of the Doge's Palace.
The importance of this commission can be gauged by the payment Giovanni received: he was granted, first the reversion of an agent's place in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and later, as a replacement, a fixed annual pension of eighty ducats.
In addition to repairing and renovating the works of his predecessors, he was commissioned, beginning in 1492 in a series of canvases for the Sala del Consiglio Maggiore of the Palazzo Ducale, illustrating the role played by Venice in the wars of Frederick Barbarossa and the papacy.
These works, executed with great interruptions and delays, were the object of universal admiration when he finished them, but nothing remains of them since they disappeared in the fire of 1577; nor have other examples of his historical and processional compositions survived, which would allow a comparison of his style in such subjects with that of his brother Gentile.
The dedication to the Ducal Palace meant that in these years Giovanni did not focus so much on altarpieces, leaving the field temporarily free, within Venice, to the painter Cima da Conegliano.
There remain, however, works of religious themes, smaller in size, which demonstrate a gradual liberation from the last restrictions of the fourteenth-century style; he gradually acquired a complete mastery of the new oil medium and mastered all, or almost all, the secrets of the perfect fusion of colors and atmospheric gradation of tones.
He is imposing the chromatic richness, as can be seen in works of this period as The Transfiguration of the 1480s. Furthermore, the relationship between the Bellini workshop and the one opened in Venice in the nineties by Marco Palmezzano remains to be studied, as interesting exchanges between the later works of the two schools can be observed.
Altarpieces of San Giobbe and San Zacarias
An interval of a few years, no doubt occupied mainly with work on the Hall of the Great Council, seems to separate the San Giobbe Altarpiece (on the left), and that of the church of San Zaccaria in Venice (on the right). Formally, the works are very similar, so comparing them serves to illustrate the change in Bellini's work over the last decade of the Quattrocento.
Both paintings are modeled after a Sacra conversazione (sacred conversation between the Virgin and saints). Both show the Virgin seated on a throne (by which the throne of Solomon was alluded to), amidst classicist columns. Both the place and the sacred figures under a semi-dome with gilded mosaics recall Byzantine architecture in the San Marco.
In the altarpiece of San Giobbe, Bellini matured and offered a complete response to the novelties introduced by the Sicilian Antonello da Messina in Venice, making it one of his most renowned works, already cited in Sabellico's De Urbe Sito (1487-1491).
The altarpiece, which was executed around 1480, was originally located on the second altar on the right of the church of San Giobbe in Venice, where with its painted spatiality it illusorily completed the real one of the altar. A large vault with cassettes presents the sacred composition in perspective, with lateral pilasters painted in the same way as those actually on the sides of the altar.
A deep niche in shadows houses in the center the sacred group of the Virgin and Child with musical angels among six saints, in the shadow of a skull covered by golden mosaics in the most typical Venetian style. It is thus a virtual prolongation of the real space of the nave, with figures that are at once monumental and warmly human, thanks to the rich chromatic mosaic.
The imposing altarpiece of St. Zachary, signed and dated 1505, is preserved in its original location, the church of St. Zachary in Venice. In this later altarpiece, Bellini depicts the Virgin surrounded by (from left): St. Peter holding his keys and the Book of Wisdom; St. Catherine and St. Lucy next to the Virgin, each holding the palm of martyrdom and the symbol of her torture (Catherine the wheel, and Lucy a plate with her eyes);
St. Jerome, who translated the Greek Bible into the first Latin edition (the Vulgate). Stylistically, the illumination in St. Zaccaria's work has been made so soft and diffuse that it makes St. Giobbe's by comparison seem almost striking by contrast. Giovanni's use of oil has matured, and the sacred figures seem to be enveloped in a still, rarefied air.
The altarpiece of San Zaccaria is considered perhaps the most beautiful and imposing of Giovanni's altarpieces, and is dated 1505, the year after the Madonna of Castelfranco painted by Giorgione.
Giovanni Bellini's The Triptych of the Frari
In 1488 Bellini signed and dated the Triptych of the Frari, for the Basilica of Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice, where it is still preserved. In this work the illusionistic experimentations of the San Giobbe Altarpiece are further developed, with the frame that "supports" the ceiling painted in three compartments, vigorously illuminated so that they appear real.
Behind Mary's throne there is in fact a niche with gilded mosaics, with a luminous study that suggests a vast depth in perspective.
Palio of Duke Barbarigo
Also from the same year 1488 is dated and signed the Palio of Duke Barbarigo (Madonna and Child, St. Mark, St. Augustine and Agostino Barbarigo kneeling), in the church of St. Peter Martyr in Murano, one of the few chronologically certain episodes in the artist's career, thanks to the mention also in the will of Doge Agostino Barbarigo.
In the painting St. Mark, protector of Venice and therefore of the Doges, presents the devotee kneeling before the Madonna with an affectionate gesture.
The quattrocentesque spatial conception is here abandoned for the first time, in favor of a freer relationship between nature and the Sacra conversazione, and even the pictorial extension represents one of the first experiments in tonal painting, different from that of Giorgione that is always linked to the theme of profane lyricism, which is missing here.
Giovanni Bellini towards the modern manner
As the sixteenth century approached, Bellini developed an innovative approach to painting and to the relationship between figures and landscape, which was later taken up by Giorgione, Titian and others, giving rise to the extraordinary innovations of Venetian painting of the mature Renaissance.
Of Giovanni's activity in the interval between the altarpieces of San Giobbe (ca. 1487) and San Zaccaria (1505), there are a few works, although most of his production disappeared with the fire of the Doge's Palace in Venice in 1577. Between 1490 and 1500 dates Christian Allegory of the Uffizi, one of the most enigmatic works of Bellinian and Renaissance production in general, populated by a series of symbolic figures whose meaning is still elusive today.
The Madonna and Child between Saints Catherine and Mary Magdalene, now in the Accademia Gallery, known as Sacred Conversation Giovanelli dates from 1500-1504. In this panel we can read a maturity in the artist's style linked to a sfumato expression of color, of the Leonardesque type.
The light falls sideways, advancing morbidly on the clothes and on the incarnations of the saints, in a silent and absorbed atmosphere, highlighted by the dark background, deprived of any connotation. The composition is symmetrical, as in all of Giovanni's sacred conversations, and the depth is suggested only by the sideways position of the two saints, who create a sort of diagonal wings directed to the central sacred group.
The characters are still separated from the landscape behind, but the naturalistic view is already unitary, limpid and charged with atmospheric values given by the coherent golden light.
The Portrait of the Doge Leonardo Loredan, dated around 1501, marked the full maturity of Antonello da Messina's lessons, evident in the general realism of the wrinkles as in the clothes, where the physical assumes the value of the dignity of the subject's position. The psychological characteristics are sublimated by a solemn distancing, in the name of the decorum of the hierarchical role of the subject.
The last ten or twelve years of the master's life saw him besieged with more commissions than he could finish. Already in the years 1501-1504 Isabella, Marquise Gonzaga of Mantua had had great difficulty in obtaining delivery from him of a painting of the Madonna and Saints (now lost) for which she had paid something in advance.
In 1505 she tried to obtain, through Cardinal Bembo, another painting by him, this time of secular or mythological subject. What the subject of this piece was, or whether it was actually delivered, is unknown.
This leads to the undisputed masterpiece of The Madonna of the Meadow (ca. 1505), a sum of metaphorical and religious meanings united with deep poetry and emotionality. The landscape is limpid and rarefied, with a serene luminosity, representing the ideal of stillness, understood as spiritual, idyllic and eremitical conciliation.
Giovanni Bellini remained active and attentive to novelties until the end. His last works reveal the influence of the young Giorgione. Dürer, who visited Venice for the second time in 1506, mentioned Giovanni Bellini as still the most important painter in the city, and full of all courtesy and generosity towards foreign painters.
In 1507 his brother Gentile died, and bequeathed him his father Jacopo's book of sketches, but on condition of finishing the Preaching of St. Mark in Alexandria (now in the Pinacoteca di Brera) which Gentile had left unfinished at the Scuola Grande di San Marco.
In the Madonna and Child Blessing of the Detroit Institute of Arts (1509) or the Brera Madonna and Child (1510) he again separates the sacred group from the landscape; but there is a new vision that recalls the conquests of Giorgione, where the human elements are fused with nature.
In the Brera Madonna, the analysis has revealed the absence of drawing under the landscape, which shows a confidence in the full and total disposition of nature. Close to this work is also a Madonna and Child in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, perhaps the last fully autograph version of the subject.
In 1513 Giovanni's position as sole master (since the death of his brother and that of Alvise Vivarini) in charge of the paintings in the Hall of the Great Council was threatened by one of his former pupils.
The young Titian wanted a share of the same commission, to be paid on the same terms; it was first granted, then rescinded a year later, and at the end of another year or two he was given it again. No doubt the old master must have been angered by his pupil's methods.
In the last period of his artistic activity he tackled mythological themes, as in 1514 with The Feast of the Gods, painted for the studiolo of Duke Alfonso of Ferrara (now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington), technically of the highest level and very careful. Titian, author of the other paintings in the studiolo, almost completely remade the landscape after the master's death in 1516.
Back to religious themes, however, Giovanni Bellini is still able to experiment with modern solutions (in composition, format, theme), which led critics to attribute the Drunkenness of Noah from the Museum of Fine Arts in Besanzon to Lotto or Titian.
He is buried in the Basilica of St. John and St. Paul in Venice, a traditional burial place for doges.
Stylistic characteristics of Giovanni Bellini
The subject matter of his work is predominantly religious. He dealt with episodes from the life of Jesus, the most frequent theme being the crucifixion, sometimes depicted with the Virgin and St. John at the foot of the Cross. The figures, plant, animal and landscape elements very often assume a well-coded symbolic value, although for moderns the reading may not always be clear.
The small devotional paintings of the Virgin and Child, alone or accompanied by saints, were generally private commissions. Their meaning is not only an "affectionate relationship between mother and child" but something more complex that often prefigures the Passion of Christ; in almost all the paintings the Child is depicted in positions reminiscent of death.
Bellini combines the metaphysical plasticism of Piero della Francesca with the human realism of Antonello da Messina, far from the exasperated realism of the Flemish and the chromatic depth typical of the Veneto, taking the path towards the so-called Venetian "tonalism".
Thanks to his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, he came into contact with the innovations of the Florentine Renaissance. He worked with him on the trip to Padua and influenced him in the expressiveness of the faces and the emotional force conveyed by the landscapes in the background.
In Padua, Bellini became acquainted with the sculpture of Donatello, who at this time was imprinting an expressionist charge to his work, approaching a style closer to the Nordic environment. Finally, he got to know the novelty, also in the perspective of the school of Forlì, thanks to the Venetian workshop of Marco Palmezzano, the best disciple of Melozzo da Forlì.
Giulio Carlo Argan reveals that the characteristic features of Bellini's painting are chromatic "tonalism" and the harmonious fusion of "classical naturalism" and "Christian spirituality".
In both the artistic and worldly sense, Giovanni Bellini's career was, on the whole, very prosperous. His long career began with Fourteenth-century styles but matured into a post-Giorgione Renaissance style. He lived to see his own school dazzle and surpass that of his rivals, the Vivarini of Murano; he embodied, with growing and maturing power, all the devotional gravity and also much of the worldly splendor of the Venice of his time.
His principal pupils were Giorgione, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo. Other pupils of Bellini's studio were Girolamo Santacroce, Vittore Belliniano, Rocco Marconi, Andrea Previtali Nicolò Rondinelli and possibly Bernardino Licinio.
In a historical perspective, Bellini was essential to the development of the Italian Renaissance for his incorporation of Northern European aesthetics. Significantly influenced by Antonello da Messina, who had spent time in Flanders, Bellini made prevalent both the use of oil painting, different from the tempera painting used at the time by most Italian Renaissance painters, and the use of a disguised symbolism characteristic of the Northern Renaissance.
As works such as St. Francis in Ecstasy (ca. 1480, left) and the Altarpiece of San Giobbe (ca. 1478) demonstrate, Bellini uses religious symbolism through natural elements, such as vines and rocks. Still, his most important contribution to art lies in his experimentation with the use of color and atmosphere in oil painting.
Works of Giovanni Bellini
The main works by Giovanni Bellini are the following:- The Crucifixion (ca. 1455) - tempera on panel, 54,5 x 30 cm, Correr Museum, Venice.
- Madonna and Child (ca. 1455) - tempera on panel, 50 x 32 cm, Musei Civici, Pavia
- The Transfiguration (ca. 1455-1460) - tempera on panel, 134 x 68 cm, Museo Correr, Venice.
- Christ on the Mount of Olives (ca. 1459) - Tempera on panel, 81 x 127 cm, National Gallery, London[3].
- Pietà (1460) - tempera on panel, 86 x 107 cm, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
- Polyptych of St. Vincent Ferrer (1464-1468) - tempera on panel, Basilica of St. John and St. Paul, Venice
- The Coronation of the Virgin (1471-1474) - oil on panel, 262 x 240 cm, Musei Civici, Pesaro
- The Resurrection of Christ (1475-1479) - oil on panel, 148 x 128 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
- St. Francis in Ecstasy (ca. 1480) - oil on panel, 124 x 142 cm, Frick collection, New York
- Triptych of the Frari (1488) - oil on panel, Basilica of Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice
- The Transfiguration (ca. 1480) - oil on panel, 116 x 154 cm, Capodimonte Museum, Naples
- "Palla" of San Giobbe (ca. 1487) - oil on panel, 471 x 258 cm, Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice
- Palio del duke Barbarigo (1488) - oil on canvas, 200 x 320 cm, San Pietro Martir, Murano
- The Sacred Allegory or Sacred Allegory (ca. 1490) - oil on panel, 73 x 199 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- The Virgin and Child between Saints Mary Magdalene and Ursula (1490) - oil on panel, 77x104 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid
- The Baptism of Christ (1500-1502) - oil on canvas, 400 x 263 cm, Santa Corona, Vicenza
- Saint Giovanelli conversation (1500-1504) - oil on panel, 75x 84 cm, Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice
- The Doge Leonardo Loredan (ca. 1501-1504) - oil on panel, 62x45 cm, National Gallery, London
- El Salvador (ca.1502) - oil on panel, 44x33 cm, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.
- Pietà (1505) - oil on panel, 65 x 90 cm, Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice
- The Madonna of the Meadow (1505) - oil on canvas transferred from wood, 67 x 86 cm, National Gallery, London.
- "Palla" of St. Zachary (1505) - oil on canvas transferred from panel, 402 x 273 cm, St. Zachary, Venice
- St. Jerome in the Wilderness (1505) - oil on panel, 49 x 39 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
- Nunc Dimittis (1505-1510) - oil on panel, 62 x 83 cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
- Madonna (1510) - oil on panel, 85 x 118 cm, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy.
- "Palla" of St. Chrysostom (1513) - oil on panel, 300 x 185 cm, S. Giovanni Crisostomo, Venice
- The Feast of the Gods (1514) - oil on canvas, 170 x 188 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.
- Woman at her boudoir (1515) - oil on canvas, 62 x 79 cm, Museum of Art History, Vienna
- Drunkenness of Noah (ca. 1515) - oil on canvas, 103 x 157 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Besancon
- Resurrection of Christ (Bellini)