Giovanni Bellini

Italian painter

• Born: c. 1430
• Birthplace: Venice, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)
• Died: 1516
• Place of death: Venice, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)

As the leading painter of the Republic of Venice through more than two generations, Bellini achieved a synthesis of major currents in art deriving from Italian centers such as Tuscany and Padua as well as from Northern Europe. His work on the poetry of light and color was the foundation of the greatness of Venetian painting in the sixteenth century.

Early Life

Giovanni Bellini (jyoh-VAHN-nee bay-LEE-nee) was possibly the second of two sons born to Jacopo Bellini and his wife, Anna Rinversi. Giovanni’s brother, Gentile, was born probably about two or three years earlier, and a sister, Nicolosia, two or three years later. The proximity of the children’s ages is significant for Venetian art, as the brothers were frequently to work in close association, and a major artistic influence on Giovanni was his sister’s husband, the painter Andrea Mantegna, whom she married in 1453.

There is little information about Giovanni’s early life, but a few biographical facts do offer some insight. For example, it is known that Giovanni’s mother was a native of the region of Pesaro, south of Venice on the Adriatic coast; Giovanni may have found it convenient to reside there while creating one of his early masterpieces, Coronation of the Virgin (c. 1473). The family connection with Pesaro suggests Giovanni’s receptiveness to the world outside the city-state of Venice. Similarly, Jacopo Bellini’s important early contact with the vibrant art of Tuscany is shown by his apprenticeship to Gentile da Fabriano.

During the early Renaissance, it became increasingly possible for a talented individual to transcend the status of craftsperson to become an artist, a person endowed with intellectual as well as manual skills. Jacopo is this sort of transitional figure in the art of early fifteenth century Italy, and his sons more particularly Giovanni were to enjoy an even higher social position than their father. To Jacopo, however, goes the credit both for the technical education of his sons and for their introduction to Renaissance ideals, including the enthusiasm for antiquity and the respect for learning embodied in the concept of Humanism.

At an unrecorded date, Giovanni married a woman named Ginevra Bocheta, and they later had a son, Alvise. His departure from his parents’ household around 1459 may not indicate his artistic independence but only his move to new quarters. Gentile was the first of the brothers to win large public commissions, and it was in this field that he specialized, producing throughout his career many monumental decorations for the Venetian fraternal groups called scuole literally, but not actually, “schools.” While it is acknowledged that Giovanni was a more adventurous and accomplished artist than Gentile, the brothers’ achievement has often been regarded collectively because of their joint dominance of Venetian art during their lifetimes and because they seemed to have esteemed each other very highly.

Giovanni’s likeness is known from an anonymous and mediocre woodcut in the 1568 edition of Giorgio Vasari’s famous work on the lives of painters as well as from a drawing (now in the Condé Museum of Chantilly, France) by one of Giovanni’s students. This profile portrait shows the middle-aged Bellini as handsome, with a well-proportioned face and a prominent but straight nose. Adjusting for the slightly different treatment of the face in the later woodcut, one might accept the argument of a prominent scholar that Giovanni pictured himself in a late work, Feast of the Gods (c. 1514), as the mythological figure Silvanus.

Life’s Work

Bellini’s independent career can be regarded as beginning around 1460. It is often impossible to determine the contributions of assistants to the collective work of a studio, and in the case of the Bellini family this is especially true in the production of the 1450’s. There is also little basis for distinguishing some of the work of this period by Giovanni from that of his brother-in-law Mantegna, who may have studied with Jacopo and worked in his studio on the same basis as his sons. Thus, Bellini’s earliest work can be conceived only in the general terms of a range of stylistic qualities and types of objects.

Aside from preparatory drawings, Bellini’s earlier work consists of small paintings of religious character, some executed on vellum and others on wooden panels of modest dimensions. The paintings on vellum have a delicacy befitting both their size and their derivation from the traditions of manuscript illustration, but the panels show added concern with the treatment of the human figure as a sculptural volume and with the placement of the figure in a natural landscape.

In Giovanni’s early panels, the influence of Mantegna is believed to be manifest. A native of the region of Padua, Mantegna was an extremely precocious artist whose style is characterized by somewhat schematized and muscular linear forms rendered with tone to achieve an incisive sculptural effect. Bellini’s debt to Mantegna may be seen in his firm contours and crisp detail as well as in his pictorial construction, but Bellini’s adaptations are more sensitively observant of nature, as in his Agony in the Garden , dating from the early 1460’s. The same subject as treated by Mantegna is more tautly composed, favoring drama over poetry; Bellini’s landscape is almost pastoral, while Mantegna’s represents, in one scholar’s words, an almost “lunar ideal of natural landscape.”

From Giovanni’s studio in the 1460’s came a remarkable outpouring of paintings of Christ, of the Madonna and Child, and of various saints. These show a mastery of form and a depth of feeling that place Giovanni, still only in his thirties, at the forefront of Venetian art. The works are freshly approached on both the technical and the emotional levels and show that, even at a considerable distance from sources of innovation in Tuscany and central Italy, Bellini was receptive to the more advanced artistic tendencies of his time. His Pietà with Virgin and Saint John , in the Brera gallery in Milan, is representative of the artist’s fully developed early manner in the way it combines assurance of form with a powerful yet restrained rendering of its subject, the sorrow at Christ’s death. Notwithstanding its relatively early date in Bellini’s career, it is one of the great achievements of European art.

The next phase in Bellini’s career is notable for the increasing use of the medium of oil paint and a growing affinity for Flemish art, within which oil techniques had been ascendant since the 1420’s. Neither the oil medium nor the influence of Northern art were entirely novel in Venice in the early 1470’s, but both were given prominence in Venice by the brief presence there of the Sicilian-born artist Antonello da Messina around 1475. It is evident that Antonello learned much of his technique from someone with close ties to the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) or one of his contemporaries, because his style was formed far less by Italian art than by the Northern tradition of rendering exact detail and effects of light. The influence of Antonello’s Flemish orientation on Bellini’s work, and thus on later Venetian painting, was lasting; the oil medium allowed for more fluid and colorful rendering of surfaces than did the traditional, fast-drying tempera paints, and provided Bellini and his successors with a material that was well suited to the Venetian artistic temperament, which was by nature more spontaneous and emotional than that of their central Italian counterparts.

During the 1470’s, Bellini’s appreciation of monumental form seems to have been enhanced by contact with the work of great Italian predecessors such as the sculptor Donatello (c. 1386-1466) and the painter Masaccio (1401-1428), though there is only indirect evidence of this. The influence of the frescoes of Piero della Francesca seems likely; Giovanni could have seen his work at Rimini, on the road between Venice and Pesaro. There is something of Piero’s austere integration of form, light, and color in the large panel of Bellini’s Coronation of the Virgin, part of the Pesaro altarpiece of the early 1470’s. A small panel of the Adoration of the Child , part of the predella, or frame, of this altarpiece, shows Bellini’s ability to create a convincing landscape environment for his solidly painted figures, but more particularly it reveals a poetic mastery of effects of light and atmosphere that was unmatched by his Italian contemporaries.

Another panel (of disputed date, but perhaps painted as early as 1475), the Saint Francis in Ecstasy in the Frick Collection in New York, is considered one of Bellini’s masterpieces. Conceived as an independent picture, this painting has a design that recalls the art of Mantegna, but its underlying character is more reflective. Bellini’s art, increasingly receptive to the beauty of landscape, is in perfect harmony with the spirit of Francis of Assisi, of all the saints the one most devoted to nature.

In the following decade, Bellini continued with much the same range of subject matter as before, but he painted with increasing assurance. An Enthroned Madonna and Child of the late 1480’s, also know as the San Giobbe altarpiece, is monumental both in size and in conception: It is more than fifteen feet high and eight feet wide and was originally installed in a Venetian church, where its pictorial space could be viewed as an extension of the actual interior space of the church. Another dimension of Bellini’s work in this period was to meet the continuing needs of the scuole for large commemorative paintings, a task he often shared with his brother, but none of these has survived.

A continuous sequence of portraits by Bellini’s hand as distinct from works of his studio cannot be established, but there are several portrait masterpieces that are unquestionably his own. His Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan , an exquisitely detailed rendering of Venice’s leader, was probably painted following Loredan’s election in October, 1501. In this work, Bellini gives a sense of the whole person in two senses: physically, by choosing a composition that shows more of the subject’s attire, and psychologically, by means of rare human insight. Bellini’s approach to portraiture soon became the norm with the new generation of painters, and his ability to keep abreast of the innovations of his younger contemporaries made him a sought-after artist into his final years.

Among Bellini’s most important paintings is a work of his last years, the Feast of the Gods . Loosely based on a subject taken from Ovid’s Fasti (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1859), the painting was commissioned by a knowledgeable patron, possibly Isabella d’Este of the court of Ferrara. Isabella, a woman of decided tastes as well as strong intellect, had begun a project of decorating some study rooms in her private apartment with paintings of pagan subjects, and she may have engaged Bellini to paint a companion piece to a work by Mantegna. Feast of the Gods is a painting that celebrates classical mythology while paying respects to the lively world of Italian Renaissance culture. One of Bellini’s few paintings on classical subjects, its humor, lyricism, and mildly erotic content show that he could be moved by antique as well as Christian themes.

Significance

Bellini’s exceptionally long and productive career spanned more than six decades. The larger part of his work belongs to the 1400’s, when Italian art evolved a unity of approach to pictorial organization and content within which local and individual styles are still strongly manifest. Bellini was Venice’s foremost painter of this period, providing one of many regional inflections to the technical and expressive development of Italian art.

Like his great contemporaries, Bellini sought with success to enhance the sense of reality in his paintings through the study of space, volume, light, and color, but, among his varied achievements, art historians have credited him with a particularly astute understanding of atmosphere. Bellini learned to give his landscape-based compositions the reality of specific times of day and conditions of atmosphere, and he applied his discoveries to reinforcing the mood of his chosen subject.

Though Bellini developed his sense of light and color within the medium of tempera paint, his use of oil paint was particularly consequential for Venetian art, which increasingly exploited the brilliance and versatility of the oil medium. Bellini’s mastery of oil was accomplished well before 1500, but his continuing conquest of its capabilities late in his career serves as a reminder that he not only survived into the new century but also was an active participant in it. Bellini remained extraordinarily vital in old age, perhaps spurred by friendly rivalry with a younger generation of painters that included Giorgione and Titian. It is likely that Giorgione was in some fashion Bellini’s pupil, but the influence of pupil on teacher is also suggested by scholars. Not long after Bellini’s death, when the Feast of the Gods came into the hands of Alfonso d’Este in Mantua, the young Titian was engaged to revise it. Titian’s kinship with Bellini to an extent one of taste as well as of technical practice is virtually the only explanation for the fact that Titian’s alterations, though regrettable from the perspective of art history, are nevertheless quite successful in their own terms.

After a half century of work, Bellini achieved a style as unified and expressive as that of his greatest contemporaries. The German artist Albrecht Dürer, visiting Bellini in Venice in 1506, had found him optimo pytor (a great painter) and pest in Gemoll (the very best). After hundreds of years, Bellini’s achievement still places him in the highest rank of European artists.

Bibliography

Freedberg, S. J. Painting in Italy, 1500-1600. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970. This discerning guide to Italian painting of the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries deals in proportion with the Bellini family, but it has a particular virtue in giving a sense of the proportion of one artist’s achievement to another, when many belong in the category “great.” A minor irritant is that illustrations are separated from the text.

Hartt, Frederick, and David G. Wilkins. History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. 5th ed. New York: H. N. Abrams, 2003. This standard survey of the field discusses the Bellini family very extensively. An excellent prelude to specialized reading, it retains its value for convenient reference to artists and works referred to in scholarly works. The illustrations are integrated with the text.

Hendy, Philip, and Ludwig Goldscheider. Giovanni Bellini. New York: Oxford University Press, 1945. This volume consists of more than one hundred illustrations of Bellini’s works with an introductory essay by Hendy. The text is aimed at a general audience and contains comparative information useful to the student without an extensive background in Renaissance art. Color reproductions are given of five key works.

Humphrey, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Collection of essays presented at a Scottish Bellini conference in 2000. Discusses Bellini’s status in Venetian society, his contributions to sculpture and architecture, and the relationship of his painterly style to general trends in both Flemish and Italian painting, among other topics. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Meiss, Millard. Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964. This short monograph on one of Bellini’s most beautiful and celebrated paintings shows that scholarship in art history can be graceful as well as illuminating. The excellent illustrations (only the title painting is shown in color) include many works by Bellini and others that help place the Saint Francis work in context.

Pächt, Otto. Venetian Painting in the Fifteenth Century: Jacopo, Gentile, and Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna. Edited by Margareta Vyoral-Tschapka and Michael Pächt. Translated by Fiona Elliott. London: Harvey Miller, 2003. Extended study of Giovanni Bellini, his father, his brother, and his brother-in-law. Pays close attention to the father’s artistic influence on the sons, and the entire family’s impact on the use of color, light, and perspective in Venetian painting. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Robertson, Giles. Giovanni Bellini. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1968. Robertson’s full-length study has the advantage of later scholarly research to differentiate it from Hendy and Goldscheider’s monograph. The author negotiates a quantity of detailed information with surprising clarity. The absence of color plates may be accounted for by the extent of the black-and-white illustrations, of which there are 120.

Wind, Edgar. Bellini’s “Feast of the Gods”: A Study in Venetian Humanism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948. Despite its many erudite references to issues in ancient literature and Renaissance Humanism many of which appear only in Latin or Italian this excellent small monograph is directed to nonspecialists as much as to scholars. Both the text and the plates give a broad sense of Bellini’s later career and his cultural environment, and, though Wind’s conclusions are questioned by later scholars, his observations are unfailingly interesting.