Giovanni Bellini

Giovanni Bellini (born c. 1430, Venice [Italy]—died 1516, Venice) was an Italian painter who, in his work, reflected the increasing interest of the Venetian artistic milieu in the stylistic innovations and concerns of the Renaissance. Although the paintings for the hall of the Great Council in Venice, considered his greatest works, were destroyed by fire in 1577, a large number of altarpieces (such as that in the church of Saints Giovanni e Paolo in Venice) and other extant works show a steady evolution from purely religious, narrative emphasis to a new naturalism of setting and landscape.

Little is known about Bellini’s family. His father, Jacopo, a painter, was a pupil of Gentile da Fabriano, one of the leading painters of the early 15th century, and may have followed him to Florence. In any case, Jacopo introduced the principles of the Florentine Renaissance to Venice before either of his sons. Apart from his sons Gentile and Giovanni, he had at least one daughter, Niccolosa, who married the painter Andrea Mantegna in 1453. Both sons probably began as assistants in their father’s workshop.

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Giovanni’s earliest independent paintings were influenced by the late Gothic graceful style of his father, Jacopo, and by the severe manner of the Paduan school, and especially of his brother-in-law, Mantegna. This influence is evident even after Mantegna left for the court of Mantua in 1460. Giovanni’s earliest works date from before this period. They include a Crucifixion, a Transfiguration, and a Dead Christ Supported by Angels. Several pictures of the same or earlier date are in the United States, and others are at the Correr Civic Museum in Venice. Four triptychs, sets of three panels used as altarpieces, are still in the Venice Accademia, and two Pietàs, both in Milan, are from this early period. His early work is well exemplified in two beautiful paintings, The Blood of the Redeemer and The Agony in the Garden.

In all his early pictures he worked with tempera, combining the severity and rigidity of the Paduan school with a depth of religious feeling and human pathos all his own. His early Madonnas, following in his father’s tradition, are mostly sweet in expression, but he substituted for a mainly decorative richness one drawn more from a sensuous observation of nature. Although the pronounced linear element—i.e., the dominance of line rather than mass as a means of defining form, derived from the Florentine tradition and from the precocious Mantegna—is evident in the paintings, the line is less self-conscious than Mantegna’s work, and, from the first, broadly sculptured planes offer their surfaces to the light from a dramatically brilliant sky. From the beginning Giovanni Bellini was a painter of natural light, as were Masaccio, the founder of Renaissance painting, and Piero della Francesca, its greatest practitioner at that time. In these earliest pictures the sky is apt to be reflected behind the figures in streaks of water making horizontal lines in a mere strip of landscape. In The Agony in the Garden (1465), the horizon moves up, and a deep, wide landscape encloses the figures, to play an equal part in expressing the drama of the scene. As with the dramatis personae, the elaborately linear structure of the landscape provides much of the expression, but an even greater part is played by the colours of the dawn, in their full brilliance and in the reflected light within the shadow. This is the first of a great series of Venetian landscape scenes that was to develop continuously for a century or more. To a city surrounded by water, the emotional value of landscape was now fully revealed. A comparison with Mantegna’s treatment of the same subject matter reveals the subtle yet fundamental differences in the styles of the two masters.

The great composite altarpiece with St. Vincent Ferrer, which is still in the church of Saints Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, was painted perhaps 10 years later, toward the mid-1470s. But the principles of composition and the method of painting had not yet changed essentially; they had merely grown stronger in expression. It seems to have been during a voyage down the Adriatic coast, made probably not long afterward, that Bellini encountered the influence that must have helped him most toward his full development: that of Piero della Francesca. Bellini’s great Coronation of the Virgin at Pesaro, for example, might have reflected some of the compositional elements of Piero’s lost Coronation of the Virgin, painted as the central panel of a polyptych. Christ’s crowning of his mother beneath the effulgence of the Holy Ghost is a solemn act of consecration, and the four saints who stand witness beside the throne are characterized by their deep humanity. Every quality of their forms is fully realized: every aspect of their bodies, the textures of their garments, and the objects that they hold. As with work by Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, the perspective of pavement and throne helps to establish the group in space, and the space is enlarged by the great hills behind and rendered infinite by the luminosity of the sky, which envelops the scene and gathers all the forms together into one.

At this time in his life, Giovanni Bellini also met Antonello da Messina, who traveled to Venice about 1475. The encounter was to prove influential for both painters. The changes in Giovanni’s work from his earlier, Mantegnesque style to the more mature, independent, and versatile manner of his later works are already visible in the San Giobbe Altarpiece.

It is the painter’s way of using the medium that makes the difference, and that depends upon his intentions and his vision. It was Bellini’s richer and broader vision that determined his future development. Unlike tempera paint, which was the medium of Bellini’s early career, oil paint is inclined to be the more transparent and fusible and therefore lends itself to richer colour and tone by allowing a further degree of glazing, the laying of one translucent layer of colour over another. This technique and the unprecedented variety with which Bellini handled the oil paint give his fully mature painting the richness associated with the Venetian school.

Giovanni’s brother, Gentile, was chosen by the government to continue the painting of great historical scenes in the hall of the Great Council in Venice; but in 1479, when Gentile was sent on a mission to Constantinople (now Istanbul), Giovanni took his place. From that time to 1480, much of Giovanni’s time and energy was devoted to fulfilling his duties as conservator of the paintings in the hall, as well as painting six or seven new canvases himself. These were his greatest works, but they were destroyed when the huge hall was gutted by fire in 1577. Contemporary students of his work can now gain only an approximate idea of their design from The Martyrdom of St. Mark in the Scuola di San Marco in Venice, finished and signed by one of Giovanni’s assistants, and of their execution from Giovanni’s completion of Gentile’s St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria after his brother’s death in Venice in 1507.

Yet a surprisingly large number of big altarpieces and comparatively portable works have survived and show the steady but adventurous evolution of his work. The principles and the technique of the Pesaro Altarpiece find their full development in the still-larger altarpiece of the Madonna from San Giobbe in the Venice Accademia, where the Virgin enthroned in a great apse and the saints beside her seem ready to melt into the reflected light. This seems to have been painted before the earliest of his dated pictures, the half-length Madonna degli Alberetti (1487), also in the Venice Accademia.

While for the first 20 years of Giovanni’s career he limited his subject matter mainly to traditional religious subjects (Madonnas, Pietàs, and Crucifixions), toward the end of the century it began to be greatly enriched not so much by the wider choice of subjects as by the development of the mise-en-scène, the physical setting of the picture. He became one of the greatest of landscape painters. His study of outdoor light was such that one can deduce not only the season depicted but almost the hour of the day.

Bellini also excelled as a painter of ideal scenes—i.e., scenes of primeval as opposed to individualized images. For the St. Francis in Ecstasy of the Frick Collection or the St. Jerome at His Meditations, painted for the high altar of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice, the anatomy of the earth is studied as carefully as those of human figures; but the purpose of this naturalism is to convey idealism through the realistic portrayal of detail. In the landscape Sacred Allegory, now in the Uffizi, he created the first of the dreamy enigmatic scenes for which Giorgione, his pupil, was to become famous. The same quality of idealism is to be found in his portraiture. His Doge Leonardo Loredan in the National Gallery, London, has all the wise and kindly firmness of the perfect head of state, and his Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1505; thought to be a likeness of the Venetian writer and humanist Pietro Bembo) in the British royal collection portrays all the sensitivity of a poet.

Both artistically and personally, the career of Giovanni Bellini seems to have been serene and prosperous. He lived to see his own school of painting achieve dominance and acclaim. He saw his influence propagated by a host of pupils, two of whom surpassed their master in world fame: Giorgione, whom he outlived by six years, and Titian.

The only extant description of Giovanni’s personality is from the hand of the great German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, who wrote to the German humanist Willibald Pirkheimer from Venice in 1506: “Everyone tells me what an upright man he is, so that I am really fond of him. He is very old, and still he is the best painter of them all.”