We shall find the two great Madonnas of 1488, for the Frari, Figure 235, and for St. Peter’s at Murano, conceived more impassively. For the city church, Bellini insisted on hieratic effect and incidental splendors, reverting to the form of the triptych and arranging it after Mantegna’s fashion with the frame and picture in one perspective. It is perhaps the grandest as it is the most formal of his altar-backs, consciously regal in the attitude of the Virgin, with saints as magisterial as so many Venetian senators. For the suburban church at Murano he set the Madonna low amid her paladins and opened up delicious landscape vistas at the sides. The thing, with all its dignity, is lyrical, and almost intimate. It anticipates the mood of the later open-air Sacred Conversations. [Illustration: FIG. 236.—Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with St. Paul and St. George.—_Venice._ ] In the nineties and the early years of the new century, masterpiece follows masterpiece, and we must proceed by selection. Giovanni invents a charming form of altar-piece for private chapels. These Madonnas and saints at half-length have already the mood of the later conversation pieces, and need only the less symmetrical scheme which Bellini’s pupil, Titian, will soon give them. For harmony one might prefer the Madonna with two female saints, or for robust contrast and vitality the Madonna with two burly military champions, Figure 236. Both are in the Venetian Academy. [Illustration: FIG. 237. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna of the Trees.—_Venice._ ] The single, half-length Madonnas, Figure 237, of this period are counted by scores, and are in many public and private collections in Europe and America. They are singularly uniform in inspiration, and yet the mood is so rich and noble that an apparent monotony is never cloying. Bellini’s gift in these pictures is to combine a kind of serene obviousness with great delicacy. There are hints of wistfulness and sadness through the series, but such sentiments are never much insisted on. The real mysticism of these pictures is nothing but the notation of the most natural and mysterious thing in the world—the bond between mother and babe, the pride of it, the exclusiveness of it, the joyous burden of it. Art could hardly be less theological or more genuinely religious than in these Madonnas. I think no human being could miss either their naturalness or their sacredness.