The new device, which he adopts quite naturally, of raising the line of sight, sets the figures in increased depth. For the first time he gives height and majesty to the young Mother by carrying the draperies down over the steps. He realises to the full the contrast between the young, fragile heads of his girl-saints and the dark, venerable countenances of the old men. The head of S. Lucy, detaching itself like a flower upon its stem, reminds us of the type which we saw in his Watcher in the sacred allegory of the Uffizi. The arched, dome-like niche opens on a distance bathed in golden light. Bellini keeps the traditions of the old hieratic art, but he has grasped a new perfection of feeling and atmosphere. Who the saints are matters little; it is the collective enjoyment of a company of congenial people that pleases us so much. The "Baptism" in S. Corona, at Vicenza, painted sixteen years later than Cima's in S. Giovanni in Bragora, is in frank imitation of the younger man. Christ and the Baptist, traditional figures, are drawn without much zest, in a weak, conventional way, but the artist's true interest comes out in the beauty of face and gesture of the group of women holding the garments, and above all in the sombre gloom of the distance, which replaces Cima's charming landscape, and which keys the whole picture to the significance of a portent. In the enthronement of the old hermit, S. Chrysostom himself, painted in 1513, Bellini keeps his love for the golden dome, but he lets us look through its arch, at rolling mountain solitudes, with mists rising between their folds. The geranium robe of the saint, an exquisite, vivid bit of colouring, is caught by the golden sunset rays, the fine ascetic head stands out against the evening sky, and in the faces of the two saints who stand on either side of the aged visionary Bellini has gone back to all his old intensity of religious feeling, a feeling which he seemed for a time to have exchanged for a more pagan tone. In 1507, at Gentile's death, Giovanni undertook, at his brother's dying request, to finish the "Preaching of St. Mark," receiving as a recompense that coveted sketch-book of his father's, from which he had adopted so many suggestions, and which, though he was the eldest, had been inherited by the legitimate son. In the preceding year Albert Dürer had visited Venice for the second time, and Bellini had received him with great cordiality. Dürer writes, "Bellini is very old, but is still the best painter in Venice"; and adds, "The things I admired on my last visit, I now do not value at all." Implying that he was able now to see how superior Bellini was to the hitherto more highly esteemed Vivarini.