Presentation at the Temple

Giovanni Bellini's Presentation at the Temple, painted around 1469 and now in the Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia, Venice, depicts the aged Simeon receiving the infant Christ in the Temple. The Querini Stampalia collection, housed in a palazzo on the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, preserves this early work of Bellini that shows his distinctive treatment of the theme—simplified composition with intense emotional focus on the exchange between the old man and the child.

Bellini's technique in the late 1460s shows his characteristic half-length figure arrangement with a parapet device, the figures rendered with firm drawing while the warm flesh tones begin to show his evolving atmospheric sensibility.