"Altarpiece of San Zaccaria"

The painting may be the most important example of a sacra conversazione scene in Italian Renaissance painting.  The sacra conversazione, or “sacred conversation”, was a type of picture showing the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child among various saints from different periods of time.  Sometimes these saints seem to communicate with each other, and sometimes with us, the viewers.  Other artists, such as Domenico Veneziano, had depicted the sacra conversazione before, but Bellini treated his painting with a particularly high level of delicacy, vibrant colors, realistic forms, and illusionistic architectural space.  In the San Zaccaria Altarpiece, the mood is one of quiet and restrained contemplation as all the figures are demure as they stand beside the Virgin and Child as the angel performs a serenade with a violin at their feet.

he composition Bellini used for the painting draws upon the Renaissance tradition of pyramidal groupings of figures. Here, the most important figures are the Virgin and Christ Child, who form the apex of the pyramid. Elevated upon a throne, they are located further back in the picture plane than are the other figures. This intelligible use of pictorial space is made possible through the keen implementation of one-point linear perspective, the configuration of which is visually understood by following the orthogonal lines of the floor tiles to their vanishing point near the foot of the Virgin.