Bellini’s work at its best is about harmony. It is about agreement brought about not by imposing uniformity, but through reconciliation. People and things retain their individual integrity, but opposites become reconciled into complements.

This painting implies a vision of larger harmonies, between humanity and nature, humanity and God, between the spiritual and the material, of a reconciliation among Christian believers. Bellini’s vision of humane harmonious spiritual community existed only in his art. All of Europe was riven with religious conflict that would culminate in the Reformation soon after Bellini’s death.

Ruskin once said of this painting that it is beyond all description and above all praise.