What would your life have looked like if you had been born five years earlier? Ten? What would have changed, not just in your familial context but in the world around you? What were the top songs and movies five and ten years before your birth? Culture moves fast, and the context into which we are born shapes us. This is why revising an artist’s birthdate matters: it reshapes the contours of what was possible within their lifetime.

Giovanni Bellini is one of the most celebrated painters of the Italian Renaissance, but remarkably little is known about his early career. Until recently, scholars had generally supposed he was born around 1435, give or take five years on either side, and that he was the son of Jacopo Bellini, another celebrated painter and draftsman.