As Giovanni Bellini approached the scriptural term of years, and the century drew to its close, he cultivates by way of recreation certain old leads which become new and powerful influences on his successors. The element of tact in the man is miraculous. He does nothing till the time has come when the doing will be most useful. Thus such pastoral recreations as the Religious Allegory in the Uffizi, Figure 238, and the little symbolical panels in the Venice Academy lead directly to the fantastic Arcadianism of Giorgione. The Religious Allegory is vaguely an illustration for the old French poem “Man’s Pilgrimage.” We have a Paradise, with the new souls in infant form. The apostles Peter and Paul stand guard outside the celestial barrier, while the Madonna presides within. Beyond a dark stream is the hazardous world, a place of caverns and crags, and hermits and centaurs; of mystery and uncertainty. Perhaps Giovanni Bellini cared rather more for the darkling shadows over water and river bank, for the broken light under a veiled sky than for the formal allegory. Certainly the element of strangeness and glamour is evident enough in the five little panels depicting virtues and vices. Again the faery quality, our earth grown strange to us, is the basis of the charm. We have noted similar fantastic inventions at Florence, notably in the work of Piero di Cosimo. Bellini evokes a more normal poetry which is based on a more intimate study of nature. Such landscapes as his, even when unpeopled, suggest nymphs and shepherds. [Illustration: FIG. 238. Giovanni Bellini. Religious Allegory, Souls in Paradise.—_Uffizi._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 240. Giovanni Bellini. Doge Loredano.—_London._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 239. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Saints.—_S. Zaccaria._ ] At seventy, at the opening of the new century, Giovanni Bellini’s mind was still flexible, so much so that we hardly know whether he leads or follows such pupils of genius as Titian and Giorgione. His color acquires a deeper glow, his warm shadows are heavier and more carefully graduated; he drops his few remaining Mantegnesque habits. In the Madonna for San Zaccaria, Figure 239, dated 1505, we have no longer the illusionistic perspective of the altar-pieces of the ’80s. The group is set well back, the suffusion of the niche with air is more dense, the saintly figures have exchanged the old resolute, hieratic attitudes for a gentle dreaminess; the mood is that of Giorgione’s contemporary altar-piece at Castelfranco. In the portrait of Doge Loredano, Figure 240, of the same year resolution and wistfulness blend fascinatingly. The delineation has the force and certainty of Antonello da Messina with a refinement Antonello never even glimpsed.