Depositing of John Bellini’s Three Pictures in La Chiesa Redentore, Venice

Depositing of John Bellini's Three Pictures in La Chiesa Redentore, Venice, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841, is one of Turner's most art-historically self-aware Venetian paintings. Giovanni Bellini, the founding master of the Venetian Renaissance tradition, had painted the altarpieces that defined the visual theology of the Republic for decades; Turner's imagined scene of Bellini's works being installed in the Redentore — the great Palladian church built in thanksgiving for deliverance from the plague of 1575 — collapses two centuries of Venetian art history into a single luminous moment. The subject allowed Turner to pay homage to the tradition of Venetian colour painting that had shaped European art from Bellini through Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, while asserting his own late luminous manner as its ultimate development. In the 1840s he was acutely aware of his place in art history and increasingly inclined toward subjects that reflected on artistic tradition and inheritance. The Venetian subjects of this period carry an elegiac quality — Venice as a repository of artistic memory — that distinguishes them from the purely atmospheric Venetian oils of the 1820s.

Turner renders the Venetian interior and canal with characteristic atmospheric luminosity, using the warm light of Venice to create a vision that honors both the city and its artistic heritage.