l its attendant circumstances, but of these,
except from Vasari's descriptions, we can form no idea. These great
pageant-pictures had become identified with the Bellini and their
following, while the production of altarpieces was peculiarly the
province of the Vivarini. Here Bellini effected a change, for sacred
subjects best suited the restrained and simple perfection of his style,
and afforded the most sympathetic opening for his idealistic spirit. For
the next twenty years or more, however, he was unavoidably absorbed in
public work, for we hear of his being given the direction of that which
Gentile left unfinished in the Ducal Palace when he went to the East in
1479. In 1492, Giovanni being ill, Gentile superintended the work for
him, and in that year he was appointed to paint in the Hall of the Grand
Council, at an annual salary of sixty ducats. Other commissions were
turned out of the _bottega_ he had set up with his brother in 1471, and
between that year and 1480 he went to Pesaro to paint the important
altarpiece that still holds its place there. It is in some ways the
greatest and most powerful thing that Bellini ever accomplished. The
central figures and the attendant saints have a large gravity and
carefully studied individuality. St. Jerome, absorbed in his theological
books, an ascetic recluse, is admirably contrasted with the sympathetic,
cultured St. Paul. The landscape, set in a marble frame, is a gem of
beauty, and proves what an appeal nature was making to the painter. The
predella, illustrating the principal scenes in the lives of the saints
around the altar, is full of Oriental costumes. The horses are small
Eastern horses, very unlike the ponderous Italian war-horse, and the
whole is evidently inspired by the sketches which Gentile brought back
on his return from Constantinople in 1481.

Looking from one to another of the cycle of Madonna pictures which
Bellini produced, and of which so many hang side by side in the Academy,
we are able to note how his conception varied. In one of the earliest
the Child lies across its Mother's knee, in the attitude borrowed from
his father and the Vivarini, from whom, too, he takes the uplifted
hands, placed palm to palm. The earlier pictures are of the gentle and
adoring type, but his later Madonnas are stately Venetian ladies. He
gives us a queenly woman, with full throat and stately poise, in the
Madonna degli Alberi, in which the two little trees are symbols of