Cima da Conegliano, Giovanni Battista

Cima da Conegliano, Giovanni Battista (1459/60-1517/18). Italian painter, named after the town of his birth, and active mainly in nearby Venice. His paintings are mostly quiet devotional scenes, often in landscape settings, in the manner of Giovanni Bellini. He has been called `the poor man's Bellini', but because of his calm and weighty figures he was also known in the 18th century (rather incongruously) as `the Venetian Masaccio'. Nine of his works are in the National Gallery, London.

Photographs by Carol Gerten-Jackson.

• The Annunciation
  1495 (60 Kb); Tempera on canvas transferred from wood; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg