ts of
light are colouring the sky and casting their magic over every common
object, and, lonely and absorbed, the Sacred Figure kneels, wrapt into
the Heavenly Vision, which is hardly more definite than a stronger
beam of light upon the radiance. One of the disciples, at least, is a
successful and natural study of a tired-out man, whose head has fallen
back and whose every limb has relaxed in sleep. Bellini is less assured,
less accomplished than Mantegna, but he is able to touch us with the
pathos of both natural and spiritual feeling.

Even earlier than this picture, critics place the "Crucifixion" and
"Transfiguration" of the Museo Correr and our own "Salvator Mundi." In
1443, when Giovanni was a young man of four or five and twenty, San
Bernardino had held a great revival at Padua, and the whole of Venice
had thronged to hear him. It is very possible, as Mr. Roger Fry suggests
in his _Life of Bellini_, that Giovanni's emotional temperament had been
worked upon by the preacher's eloquence, and the very poignant feelings
of love and pity which his early art expresses were the deliberate
consequence of his sympathy with the deep religious mysteries expounded.

In the two pictures in the Correr, Bellini is still going with the
Paduan current. In both we have the winding roads so characteristic of
his father, but the rocks in the "Transfiguration" have the jointed,
arbitrary character of Mantegna's and the draperies are plastered to the
forms beneath; yet the figures here have a beauty and a dignity which no
reproduction seems able to convey. The feeling is already more imposing
than the execution. Christ and the two prophets tower up against the
belt of clouds, the central figure conveying a sense of pathetic
isolation; while below, St. John's attitude betrays a state of tension,
the feet being drawn up and contorted. This picture prepares us for the
overwhelming emotion we find in the "Redeemer" and the group of Pietas.
The treatment of the Christ was a development of the early _motif_ of
angels flying forward on either side of the Cross, but here the sacred
blood pouring into the chalice is also sacramental and connected with
the intensified religious fervour which had led to the foundation of
the Franciscan and Dominican orders, illustrations of which are met
with in the miniatures and wood-engravings of fifteenth-century books
of devotion. The accessories, the antique reliefs, the low wall, the
distant buildings, h