"Pieta"

This painting is significant because it marks Bellini's move away from the stylistic practices of Mantegna and the Paduan school. It shows the artist exploring his own, more serene and intimate style; a style that was softer than that seen in his previous paintings. His open low-lying landscape is suffused with natural light and opened up yet further by the horizontal fleeting clouds and sky. The stiffly-wrapped drapery of his costumes is replaced by far softer, more sweeping, folds. The grace these peripheral changes add to the image support an intimacy of feeling between the mother and her dead son (for there can be no higher love than that between mother and only son) which is immensely powerful in its tenderness. This was an aspect of Bellini's work that becomes a recognizable feature in his paintings to come. Also noticeable here are the beginnings of his ability to infuse classical themes and compositions with personal interpretation. Though he has a vital compositional function as a third party in the triptych, the somewhat stilted figure of Joseph (when compared to Mary) is still clearly absorbed in personal grief. 

The fervor of religiosity so keenly depicted in Bellini's earlier work has dissipated and become something more refined and humanistic. The sorrow which Bellini has here conceived is divine only in its excess of humanity. It is the simple, universal and agonizing loss of a mother the viewer feels here over the loss of an ardent disciple. This is, in part, thanks to the development of the artist's rendering of the human figure. The move away from an emphasis on line and contour, towards more modeled planes and shading gives dead weight to Christ's arms and softness to his skin, he is almost ready to slump out of the image.