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Giovanni Bellini
Giovanni Bellini
born c. 1430, , Venice [Italy]
died 1516, Venice
Italian painter who made Venice a centre of Renaissance art
comparable to Florence and Rome. 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
asthat in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice) and other
extant works show a steady but adventurous 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 15th-century Gothic revival, 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.
Giovanni's earliest independent paintings were more strongly
influenced by the severe manner of the Paduan school, and especially
of his brother-in-law, Mantegna, than they were by the graceful
style of Jacopo. 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,” anda “Dead Christ Supported by Angels.” Several
pictures of the same or earlier date are in the United States and
others at the Museo Civico Correr in Venice. Four triptychs, a set
of three panels used as an altarpiece, are still in the Venice
Accademia, and two “Pietās,” both in Milan, are all from this early
period. His early work is well exemplified in two beautiful
paintings now in the National Gallery of London, “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 ofreligious
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 traditionand 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,” 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.
The great composite altarpiece with St. Vincent Ferrer, which is
still in the church of SS. 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 hadnot yet changed
essentially; they had merely grown strongerin 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, the first Venetian picture in the full style of the
Renaissance, probably reflects and carries still further in
composition the ideas expressed by Piero in an unrecorded
“Coronation of the Virgin,” the lost centrepiece of a polyptych
originally in the church of S. Agostino at Borgo Sansepolcro.
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. Aswith work by Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, the
perspective and the polychrome of pavement and throne help 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. Harmony is the aim of all art, but the significance of the
harmony depends upon the significance of its parts, as well as upon
the degree of its intensity. Here, Bellini has provided humanity
with the full grandeur of nature, and it is nature endowed with all
that is religious in man. The unity achieved has an emotional warmth
that is uniquely his.
A new degree of technical achievement is implied. The fact that at
this point Giovanni painted mainly in oil does not completely
explain his greatness. Piero was one of many Italian painters who
were already using the oil medium. A legend that Giovanni ceased to
paint in tempera only after he was introduced to oils by Antonello
da Messina, who was in Venice in 1475/76, is without point, for much
the same effects can be produced in either medium.
It is the way of using the medium that makes the difference—and that
depends upon the painter's intentions and upon his vision. It was
Bellini's richer and wider vision that determined his future
development. 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 ofglazing, the laying of one translucent
layer of colour over another. It is this technique and the
unprecedented variety with which he handled the oil paint that gives
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 wassent on a mission to
Constantinople, 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.
We can now only gain an approximate idea of their design from “The
Martyrdom of St. Mark” in the Scuola di S. 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
Madonna altarpiece from S. Giobbe in the Venice Accademia, where the
Virgin enthronedin 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,” also in the Venice Accademia, of 1487.
While for the first 20 years of Giovanni's career the subject matter
was limited mainly to Madonnas, Pietās, and Crucifixions, toward the
end of the century it began to be greatly enriched not so much by
the wider choice of subjects, which were still mainly religious, as
by the development of the mise-en-scčne, 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 Sta. 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
dreamyenigmatic 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 “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 livedto 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 personal description extant of Giovanni is from the hand of
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.”
Sir Philip Hendy
