Saint Jerome in the desert

Jacopo Bellini was a Venetian painter and draughtsman whose detailed preparatory drawings established new standards for Renaissance workshop practice. Active in Venice during the mid-fifteenth century, he developed a distinctive approach to linear perspective and architectural rendering that influenced the next generation of Venetian artists, including his sons Gentile and Giovanni. His surviving sketchbooks, filled with meticulously observed studies of figure, drapery, and spatial construction, reveal an artist equally committed to empirical observation and classical proportion.

Venice, Italy