The Blood of the Redeemer

Giovanni Bellini's Blood of the Redeemer, painted around 1465 and now in the National Gallery, London, is a devotional image showing Christ displaying his wound with blood streaming into a chalice. The work's eucharistic symbolism—equating Christ's blood with the wine of communion—reflects the intense sacramental devotion of 15th-century Venice. This early work shows Bellini combining the precise linearity of his Paduan training with the emotional depth that would characterize his mature art.

Bellini's early style features the sharp contours and firm modeling of his Paduan period, with meticulous rendering of Christ's wounds and the chalice detail, set against a landscape background with the atmospheric light effects he was beginning to explore.