This painting is a late panel painting by Giovanni Bellini
and it shows the assassination of Saint Peter Martyr.
It’s a rather horrible story.
Saint Peter Martyr was a Dominican who preached against the Cathar conspiracy.
He was born in 1206 and he was returning from preaching
when he was set upon by two Cathars and assassinated.
He was travelling with his companion brother Dominic who actually gets away.
But it’s a remarkable composition
because here we have brother Dominic in the centre of the painting
and here we have the most important part of the picture down in the bottom corner.
It’s very, very novel and inventive.
Before the painting was cleaned
and I have spent three and a half years of my life cleaning and restoring this painting.
Many of the details that we now see were not visible.
For example, the cleaver which is the attribute of the saint,
because he was first of all chopped at with a cleaver on his head
and then he was stabbed to finish him off;
that was completely painted out, so one had to guess that it was Saint Peter Martyr
but it had always puzzled art historians about where the cleaver was.
And actually another rather wonderful detail,
a fairly modern detail that was uncovered, the ragged knees of the woodsmen.
But also the two figures of woodcutters had previously been very mysterious.
In 1500 a collection of the miracles of the saint was published
and I think Bellini or whoever commissioned this painting must have known it.
Because the miracle was that a Cathar nobleman in Milan
sent his servant out to chop wood
on the day of the canonisation of Saint Peter Martyr
and the servant was very unhappy about this and he prayed on his way to the wood
that God would grant a miracle which he did
because when he chopped the wood the trees began to bleed.
In the story it said he was simply covered with blood.
But Bellini is always very discreet in his narratives
and so we have to look very hard to see the blood.
But here are three chops into the wood
each of them with a stroke of red and then this tree is also bleeding over here.
Everything else in the painting seems to be nothing to do with the story.
They’re going on with their lives totally oblivious of the horrible episode
that’s happening in the foreground and so we have this beautiful pastoral scene here,
which is a sort of precursor to the great Venetian pastoral tradition of the 16th century.
And then over on this side we have the cattle, people chatting at a well,
and then the town of Verona and beyond this beautiful landscape
with the light catching the blue mountains.
This painting is as much about painting nature.
Nobody had painted trees like this before, they’re absolutely astonishing,
and light which of course is Bellini’s great thing.
This is exactly the kind of thing that the young Titian who clearly knew this painting and admired it enormously
took up in his work and indeed I don’t think he ever forgot this picture.
The shaft of light that runs behind the trees
is something that appears in his work throughout his career,
even in his very last paintings like the 'Death of Actaeon' here in the National Gallery.
He’s still remembering this picture, and many other Venetian artists must have seen it.
So it’s really pivotal for our understanding of Venetian painting of the 16th century.