In his depiction of Jesus newly risen from the tomb and lifting his right hand in gentle blessing, painted around 1500, Giovanni Bellini represents Christianity’s savior as the morning dawn. At the far right, the bell tower of a distant town pierces the incandescent horizon, poised to toll and announce the arrival of a new day.

In this extraordinary masterpiece — one of 12 pictures in “Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice,” newly opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum — sunrise is breaking, its cloud-streaked sky washed in diaphanous smudges of orange, yellow, pink and blue. Yet the sun cannot be the source of the body’s illumination, which comes in from the opposite direction at the left front.