Towards 1480 Giovanni Bellini’s work assumes monumental breadth, and withal a new sweetness. His Madonnas settle into what was to be the Venetian type—superb, mature forms at once queenly and maternal. Earlier there had been no Madonna type in his work but a singular variety of forms and faces. In generalizing the stately charm of Venetian motherhood, Giovanni moves towards the grand style, and does so nearly twenty years sooner than the Florentines. His characteristic works are now great altar-pieces, with monumental distribution of the figures within fine architectural spaces. Generally the frame is a part of the pictorial organism, the plastic front of a pavillion. It is about the only survival of Mantegna’s practice in these solemn and gracious pictures. Unluckily the first of the series perished in 1867 in the disastrous fire which robbed us also of Titian’s Death of St. Peter Martyr. But surviving copies of this altar-back for the Church of S. Giovanni e Paolo confirm the tradition that it was painted well before 1480. In its arrangement and details, especially in the tendency to crowd the many figures forward, it reveals to me the influence of Antonello da Messina’s great altar-piece for San Cassiano. It had apparently a somewhat rigid formality like that of the slightly earlier piece at Pesaro. Bellini is not yet quite at ease in his new and broader style, but he has at least glimpsed the ideal of monumentality and acquired a new technique, that of oil painting, in which to express it. [Illustration: FIG. 235. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Saints.—_Frari, Venice._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 235_a._> Giovanni Bellini. Madonna of St. Job.—_Venice._ ] We find him full-grown in the noble Madonna of St. Job, Figure 235a, made for the church of that name about 1484 and now in the Venice Academy. In this picture the new Venetian ideals of ardor and gravity unite harmoniously with the old ideal of material splendor. What playings of light and half-lights there are over mosaics, polished marbles and carvings! How admirably the strict symmetry of the group is relieved by varying the postures of the six saints and by contrasting the sober garb of the monkish saints with the superb nudity of Saints Job and Sebastian and the shimmering silks of the playing angels below. And the great picture, with all its monumentality, retains much of that old lyrical fire, which is gradually yielding to more sedate and reflective aims.