Giovanni Bellini’s crucial importance in Venetian Renaissance painting was not recognised until the nineteenth century. Schack, who promoted this reappraisal along with art critics and historians of the calibre of Jacob Burckhardt and John Ruskin, had several of the artist’s principal works copied for his collection. Wolf made this replica of the Frari triptych in the winter of 1870–71, in the unavoidably unfavourable conditions of the time and place.