Workshop of Giovanni Bellini, 'The Circumcision', about 1500

According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus Christ was circumcised, like all Jewish baby boys, when he was eight days old (Luke 2: 21). He is shown naked, sitting on a cushion upon a table or altar, clenching his little fists as a priest performs the ritual. His mother, the Virgin Mary, gently props him up; the old man behind is his father, Joseph.

An attendant holds back the priest’s robe with a gloved hand, an action mirrored on the right, where a woman pulls up a semi-transparent cloth that covers part of the table. It’s as though they are pulling back stage curtains to reveal the scene’s central drama, the circumcision. The transparent cloth resembles those worn by Christ in Byzantine images of the Virgin and Child, and may be a deliberate reference to them; they were a familiar sight in Venice due to the city’s mercantile connections in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The robes and veils of the figures around Christ have been carefully painted in jewel-like colours using expensive pigments. The most costly was ultramarine, used for the Virgin’s blue robe, but it has degraded over time. The border of the priest’s cloak is decorated with ‘pseudo-Kufic’ lettering – an imitation of Arabic calligraphy often used in medieval and Renaissance Italian painting to distinguish biblical figures whose origins were in the Holy Land. The priest’s striped headdress is decorated with floral designs similar to those found on Persian and Ottoman ceramics, and the woman in the yellow veil wears a cap decorated with rows of pearls, probably also intended as a sign of her eastern origins. All these details reflect the trading and diplomatic relationship between Venice and the Turkish Ottoman empire.

Christ’s nakedness emphasises his vulnerability, and his position on the altar is probably intended to bring to mind a sacrifice – like that of a lamb, part of Jewish religious tradition in this period. In the Gospels, John the Baptist refers to Christ as the ‘lamb of God’, anticipating his sacrifice at the Crucifixion. So, while the picture depicts a moment from Christ’s infancy, it foreshadows his adulthood and the events that became the foundation of the Christian faith.

Paintings of this subject were highly popular in Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In order to meet the huge demand for his pictures, Giovanni Bellini had a large workshop of assistants who produced works in his style. This painting was made by workshop members who produced pictures with his signature. Bellini may have contributed to the women’s faces, but the texture of the fabrics is not as convincing as in his portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, for example, suggesting that much of the work was done by his assistants.

It inspired numerous copies in Venice and beyond. The close-up view and the arrangement of the figures comes from a composition by Bellini’s brother-in law, Andrea Mantegna. It shows the presentation of Christ as a baby in the Temple (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), a picture that Bellini himself adapted (Museo della Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice).