Young Woman At Her Toilet

Giovanni Bellini (Venice c1433 - Venice 1516) Signed and dated 1515 Now in the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

The painting The Young Woman at Her Toilet is referred to in the inventory of 1649 of paintings for sale written in French as "Une Venus nuue avec un Miroir - A naked Venus with a mirror". Just as Giorgione dominated early 16th century Venetian painting, the Bellini family and the products of their workshop dominated painting in Venice in the last half of the 15th century. Giovanni Bellini became the most single influential teacher of his generation and among his famous and accomplished pupils were Giorgione and Titian. His fame rested on his ability as a painter of Madonnas and other devotional paintings that were imaginative inventive interpretations of large altarpieces, on small devotional works and votive offerings. These Renaissance paintings portrayed illusionist space with a special luminosity, depth and softness of colouring only made possible by the adoption of oil painting, a technique learned in the mid 1470s from the Flemish tradition of Jan Van Eyck and Antonello da Messina, who visited Venice in 1475-6.

This is a late painting completed a year before the artists death at the great age of 83, showing the influence that his pupils, Giorgione and Titian, were by now exerting on him. It attempts to show the female nude figure in a credible yet dreamlike landscape, conveying the diverse surfaces of the oriental carpet, the nude figure, her drapery and headdress through the unifying medium of colour. This picture was probably purchased at about the same time that Lord Basil Feilding, acting for the 3rd Marquis ( later Ist Duke) of Hamilton, bought the famous painting St Margaret and the Dragon after Raphael from the procurator Pruili. This later transaction was completed, according to Feilding and Hamilton's correspondence in February 1638 (Feilding to Hamilton, Venice, 5 February 1638).