Sala IX. is one of the most interesting of all, for here are the works of Gian Bellini, Mantegna, and some of the best examples of that individual and fascinating painter, Carlo Crivelli. On entering, one is at once arrested by the noble Pietà of Gian Bellini (214). In this most touching picture the artist has expressed himself with a deep human feeling which he rarely shows afterwards. We feel almost awed in the presence of the Mother’s infinite love and sorrow, and the perfect peace and calm of the dead Christ amid the agony of hopeless grief. St. John cries aloud in his despair, and a pitiless dawn is breaking behind them. It is an early work and the treatment of the flesh and heavy draperies is broad and severe. In the picture hanging next, Madonna and Child in a beautiful landscape (215), dated 1510, we see the change wrought by nearly fifty years. The intensity of feeling of the young Bellini has died away in technical perfection. The Madonna and Child (216) is an early work of the same period as the Pietà. In this beautiful sad Mother and Child is visible the earnest sentiment and the same broad manner of painting. Mantegna’s three pictures hang opposite, and it is interesting to compare them with Bellini’s, as the two painters had much in common to start with, and departed widely each on his own lines afterwards. The Polyptych, St. Luke and other saints, with Pietà in upper part (200), is one of his earliest works, finished in 1454. The figures are very refined and carefully drawn, but they are rather stiff, and the execution almost timid. Beside this picture hangs one of his latest works, the Dead Christ and the Maries (199), and we can note the difference between the early and late style of the master; the careful academic manner of the first has yielded to the broad freedom of the second. This uncompromisingly foreshortened figure must have been an experiment, and is chiefly interesting technically. The Madonna and Child surrounded with cherubim (198) is a beautiful picture, painted in the broad manner of Mantegna’s maturity.