Perseverance

Giovanni Bellini's Perseverance of around 1490, one of his allegorical figures, depicts the personification of sustained effort and constancy in the figurative language of classical allegory. The secular allegorical figure series demonstrates Bellini's engagement with the Humanist intellectual culture of late fifteenth-century Venice, and his ability to apply the formal dignity he brought to sacred painting to mythological and allegorical subjects reflects the growing interpenetration of sacred and secular themes in Venetian Renaissance culture.

The allegorical figure is rendered with the same technical refinement Bellini applied to all his work, the symbolic attributes clearly presented while the overall treatment maintains the contemplative serenity characteristic of his mature style.