This work portrays the Agony in the Garden with Christ kneeling on the Mount of Olives in prayer, with his disciples Peter, James and John sleeping near to him.

The picture is closely related to the similar work by Bellini's brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna, also in the National Gallery.

Giovanni Bellini is widely recognized as not only one of the foremost artists of Quattrocento Venice but of the entirety of the Italian Renaissance.

[2][3] Bellini almost exclusively spent the majority of his life in his native Venice, seeming to have only ventured out once to sketch the landscape off the Adriatic coast in the mid-1470s.

[2] Bellini's work marks a noticeable shift from the even illumination and equality in the intensity of the forms, seen in Mantegna's painting, commonplace in fifteenth-century Italian art.

The painting cannot visually represent Jesus's words "Let this cup pass from me", nor his insistence to his disciples to stay awake with him, nor his final acceptance of his fate.