Holy Family with Two Donors

In the first decade of the 16th century Vittore Carpaccio adds a superior quality of style to his art, keeping his adherence to the rigid canons of perspective construction unaltered and continuing to pay great attention to the definition of his spaces, to the perfect harmony of colours, without basically incorporating any of the novelties being developed around him. In the Holy Family with Two Donors in the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, dated 1505, the broad landscape modelled on the art of Giorgione stands in contrast to the artist’s usual practice of not relating the natural atmosphere to the mood of the human figures in the foreground.