The great exhibition of Titian’s late work shown this past autumn in Vienna has now moved to the Accademia in Venice in a rather amputated, but still beautiful incarnation. Worth seeing alone for the rare chance to see the Kromeríz Flaying of Marsyas and the Accademia’s own Pietà, which did not travel to Vienna, hung next to one another. A constellation singularly revelatory of central concerns in Titian’s late work.

Otherwise, the Venice exhibition unfortunately misses many of the main draws of the Vienna show: the St. Petersburg St. Sebastian, the Escorial Crucifixion, the Prado Danae, the Fitzwilliam Tarquin and Lucretia, and the entire, extremely fascinating section on replicas, are not there. Partially making up for these omissions are three pictures from Naples: the magnificent Portrait of Pope Paul III, the Magdalen, which provides fine comparison with the privately owned one that was also displayed in Vienna, and — most notably — the recently restored San Domenico Maggiore Annunciation. The inclusion of this latter picture makes one wonder why the San Salvatore Annunciation, which was a centrepiece in Vienna, was sent back to its permanent home across the city instead of having it displayed alongside this picture — a genuinely great opportunity wasted.

During Albrecht Dürer’s second stay in Venice, in 1506, he wrote back to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nüremberg about his experiences in the Serenissima, amongst other things describing the artists at work there. Of the elderly but still very much active Giovanni Bellini, he wrote that he was still “der pest im Gemoll” — ‘the best in painting.’ When Dürer wrote this, Bellini had recently completed his altarpiece for the Church of San Zaccaria (where it remains), dated 1505, a so-called Sacra Conversazione, ie. the Madonna and Child surrounded by select saints, a traditional model in ecclesiastic art dating back centuries. But crucially innovative, hugely influential, and deeply touching.

This was a time when a trio of young, ambitious and singularly gifted artists, Giorgione, Sebastiano Luciani (later anointed ‘del Piombo’) and Titian — the latter two pupils and the former a close associate of Bellini’s — were poised to displace the older master as the central innovator in Venetian painting, and change its course forever. The San Zaccaria altarpiece, however, is evidence that Bellini himself understood what was happening. Far from oblivious to the innovations of Central Italian artists, especially Leonardo’s dissolution of the barrier between individual and world, Bellini was at this point consistently defining his figures in clear, but liquid light, proving that he was, indeed, still pest im Gemoll.