Falsehood

Giovanni Bellini's Falsehood of around 1490, an allegorical figure companion to his Fortune, depicts the personification of deception in the figurative language of classical allegory that Humanist patronage was introducing into Venetian painting. The secular allegorical subject demonstrates Bellini's versatility beyond sacred painting and his engagement with the Humanist intellectual culture that was transforming Venetian patrician taste in the late fifteenth century. The allegorical series reveals his capacity for different modes of address alongside his more characteristic devotional painting.

The allegorical figure is rendered with the same refined technique Bellini applied to his sacred subjects, the symbolic details painted with clarity while the overall handling maintains the poised, meditative quality that characterizes all his mature work.