Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror

Giovanni Bellini's Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror, painted around 1515 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is one of the most remarkable works of his final years. Painted when Bellini was about eighty-five, the work shows the aged master engaging with the sensuous nude subject that younger painters like Giorgione and Titian had popularized. The painting demonstrates Bellini's extraordinary capacity for artistic renewal and his refusal to be left behind by changing tastes.

Bellini renders the nude with the warm, atmospheric technique of his final period, achieving a luminous softness in the flesh tones and mirror reflection that demonstrates his continued mastery of oil painting at the end of his long career.