In these later years Giovanni Bellini multiplied, largely through student aid, conversation pieces with gracious gatherings of saints in the open air. The mood is that of courtly revery. Titian and Palma will later repeat the theme indefinitely. One of the best is at S. Francesco della Vigna, and bears the date 1507. It is an idyl borrowing religious forms. In the altar-piece painted in 1513, Figure 241, for the church of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, Giambellino anticipates the new and compositional forms of the rising generation. The rich architecture opens upon a contemplative old man reading on a crag, with majestic mountain lines behind him athwart a serene sky. Everything above is off centre and diagonal, stability being preserved by the great vertical figures of the saints in the foreground, and by the formality of the parapet behind them. We have almost a picture within a picture, the maximum of formality and informality, of nature and artifice—all those elaborate and calculated beauties which we associate with Titian’s maturity. There is withal a mystical earnestness of which Titian himself lacked the secret. [Illustration: FIG. 241. Giovanni Bellini. St. John Crisostom.—_S. Giov. Crisostomo._ ] In his remaining two years Bellini designed the lovely and modest nude Lady at her Toilet, at Vienna, and the Feast of the Gods, Figure 242, now in Mr. Joseph Widener’s collection at Philadelphia. His career ends in a rather skeptical acceptance of the sensuous graces of the new humanism, for the gods are merely Venetian picnickers on an excursion. The penetrating poetry of the picture is of a homely sort without pretensions to grandeur. The landscape is partly by Titian. Giovanni died in 1515, being more than eighty-five years old. As late as 1506, Albrecht Dürer found him the greatest artist at Venice. He had begun with the faint dawn of the Renaissance and ended in its midday glow. He had raised Venetian painting to monumental estate, had mastered the secrets of landscape and its illumination, had initiated a delightful pastoralism, had conveyed religious emotion in forms humanly sweet and grave, had made the best of every world. Scores of his pupils extended his manner to Brescia, Bergamo, Vicenza, and Treviso. His genius knew neither haste nor hesitation, he was almost never below his best. The Renaissance produced a few painters of greater scope and powers, but none more consistently great as an artist or more venerable as a personality. [Illustration: FIG. 242. Giovanni Bellini. Feast of the Gods.—_Widener Coll., Elkins Park, Pa._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 243. Bartolommeo Vivarini. Madonna with Saints.—_Naples._ ]