Portrait of Lorenzo Giustiniani

Gentile Bellini's Portrait of Lorenzo Giustiniani, painted around 1465 and now in the National Museum in Warsaw, depicts the first Patriarch of Venice, who was canonized in 1690. Giustiniani was renowned for his ascetic life and reform of the Venetian clergy, and his image was widely venerated. Gentile Bellini, as Venice's preeminent portrait painter, was the natural choice for creating authoritative likenesses of the city's most distinguished figures.

Gentile's portrait style emphasizes precise, documentary accuracy in capturing the patriarch's features, with the careful linear technique and restrained coloring that characterized the Bellini workshop's approach to official portraiture.