Giovanni Bellini

Giovanni Bellini grew up in the household of Jacopo Bellini, at the centre of Venice's leading family of painters, and Andrea Mantegna became his brother-in-law. Moving from tempera to oil, he used slow-drying glazes to bathe Madonnas, Pietàs and saints in soft, warm light and luminous landscape. He made Venice a centre of painting to rival Florence and taught both Giorgione and Titian. In his eighties he was still experimenting, painting The Feast of the Gods for Alfonso d'Este in 1514.