Originally in the church of San Giobbe, the altarpiece was commissioned by the Foscari family for a funeral. The New Testament episode of Christ’s agony in the garden is shown in the middle distance immersed in an almost Giorgionesque landscape background: Christ is kneeling in prayer on the top of a rock while Peter, James, and John are asleep below. The scene is framed by a cross-vaulted architectural construction in which the four full-figure saints are shown in silent meditation. According to Cicogna (Delle iscrizioni veneziane, 1853), these saints bear the same name as members of the commissioning family. The pyramidal compositional structure and the juxtaposing of two distinct spatial contexts references the style first used by Giovanni Bellini for his late-period San Giovanni Crisostomo Altarpiece (1513), and allow the artist to create a hybrid of the traditional altarpiece, which was purely contemplative, and the new narrative typology, which was coming into favour for Venetian churches in the 1510s. In the scroll in the lower left we can see Basaiti’s signature and date, which should be read as 1516 instead of 1510 according to nineteenth-century scholarly reassessment, subsequently confirmed by stylistic analysis, which displays the painter’s greater maturity in rendering the figures compared to his Calling of the Sons of Zebedee (1510, cat. 39), exhibited in the same hall.
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