Jesus in the Olive Grove (c. 1460): 81.3×127 cm, oil on panel, National Gallery, London.

Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516) was the most famous painter of the fifteenth-century Venetian school and a reformer of Venetian painting. In his early period he was deeply influenced by his father Jacopo and his brother-in-law Mantegna, within a style of harsh, strongly individualized imagery characteristic of the early Renaissance. It was not until Messine introduced the new medium of oil painting that Giovanni truly liberated his sensibility, adding soft, sumptuous color to his rational spaces and forms, and thereby creating an outstandingly perfect painterly space. He painted many famous images of the Madonna, all imbued with solemn and sacred beauty. Even more noteworthy are his outstanding portraits, which vividly convey an eternal human condition, achieving excellence and perfection in a state of contemplation. Subsequent Venetian painters all came under his profound influence: Giorgione, Titian, Vecchio, and the German painter Dürer were no exceptions. (The famous German Renaissance painter Dürer first visited Venice in 1494–1495 and was deeply influenced by Giovanni Bellini; he returned to Venice in 1505 and paid tribute to Bellini with the painting La Fête du Rosaire.)

The painting Jesus in the Olive Grove is a representative work of Giovanni Bellini's transition from the International Gothic style toward the modern Renaissance. Under the influence of Mantegna's natural, harsh, austere, and solid realistic style, it inaugurated his own distinctive manner. In the mysterious atmosphere of dawn's first light at daybreak and the dramatic, precipitous, winding theatrical landscape of hills, the three followers of Jesus Christ in the foreground are still fast asleep—one leaning against the hillside wall, one resting on a thigh, and another lying flat on the ground (somewhat reminiscent of Mantegna's foreshortened pose of the dead Christ). In contrast, Jesus Christ has already awakened and kneels on a steep slope facing east, praying to a small angel. In the middle ground, on the opposite bank of a river, a column of Roman soldiers leads a prisoner walking past (citing an episode from the Bible), while in the distance a small village disappears on the horizon. Eye-catching on the left, atop a high, steep rocky hill, sits an unusual village, with lush green clusters of olive trees surrounding the farmstead on the slope. A winding path leads to the right toward a village with a prominent tower and walls on a projecting hill.

Within the cold, naturalistic imagery, the rigorously rhythmic composition, the natural perspective of scale and distance introducing depth and breadth into the painterly space, the chiaroscuro lighting and contrasting tones, Bellini's outstanding emotion and faith are on display. The art critic K. Clark wrote: "It is in that dawn and dim, tragic light that Bellini expressed himself in his early works; whenever he wished to intensify his sensibility, he frequently employed this kind of scene."