Until 9 April Canberra's National Gallery plays host to the collection of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. The byline for the expansive Renaissance exhibition touts Raphael, Botticelli, Titian and Bellini. This is a little misleading — of the four, only Bellini is represented with any justice; and while the show opens with a fine selection of early Renaissance works, it's the prodigy from the North who catches the eye.
The astonishing lustre of Bellini's Madonna and Child (1475) is capable of vivifying even the most jaded pair of eyes. Schoolchildren, at their wits' end in the face of the fusty piety of Lorenzo Monaco and his ilk, cling to the exquisite folds of the Madonna's cloak. Compared to the alpine frostiness, the inert Gothicisms of an artist such as Fra Carnevale, the young Venetian, painting at a time of great social and political upheaval, must have seemed like a gift from God; the profane world made blessed again through the divine alchemy of the brush.
Bellini's command of oil painting, his mastery of the subtleties of tone, light and shade, was its own form of sorcery. In a typical case, successive layers, often of wildly contrasting colour, were administered by an artist, before a glaze was applied, and voilà: a human form, the face of a Saint or an Olympian, emerged with the kind of verisimilitude unthinkable a century before.
Yet the Renaissance, as everyone knows, embodied a revolution not only in form, but in content: this is what makes an artist like Bellini so good. A genre, an established visual code — in this case, the Madonna and Child, of which the exhibition furnishes no fewer than eight examples — is subtly tweaked, enlivened by a crisp, even zesty piece of human theatre. The Madonna contemplates the sublime countenance of the Father, while the bambino, clearly anxious to be on its way, raises one leg in a gesture of defiance, a perfect half-scowl etched onto his tiny features.
A sole, pitch-perfect early Raphael adorns its own wall in the second room. His Saint Sebastian, painted in 1501 is, in a twist on the familiar pathos, superbly beatific, wholly unruffled by the prospect of a coming martyrdom. The portrait is elegant, supple, hyper-refined — a