Bellini

BELLINI. - A celebrated family of painters to whom is essentially owed the renewal of Venetian painting from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the early years of the sixteenth. Its founder was Jacopo, born, it seems, in the early years of the 15th century, already recorded as a painter in 1424, a pupil of Gentile da Fabriano. Jacopo was a friend and father-in-law of Mantegna, to whom in 1453 he gave his daughter in marriage. He was still living on 17 January 1470, but had already been dead for some time by 23 November 1471. His major works have been destroyed: among those remaining we recall the Christ on the Cross in the civic museum of Verona, poorly preserved; the Madonna and Child in the Accademia gallery of Venice, still rigid and with Gothic reminiscences in the ornament; the Madonna and Child in the Tadini gallery at Lovere, inspired by Gentile da Fabriano; the Madonna and Child in the Uffizi, in which the hieratic solemnity is moderated by the human gesture of teaching the child the gesture of blessing; the Madonna from the church of Legnaro near Padua, now in the Accademia of Venice, in which an influence of his son Giovanni seems to be discernible. The Madonnina of the Brera gallery is dated 1448.

The works preserved by themselves alone would not be sufficient to make us understand the art of Jacopo and his importance in the development of Venetian painting, if we did not know his two books of drawings, one in the British Museum in London and the other in the Louvre, perhaps prepared by him for his sons. These drawings reveal to us how Jacopo was truly the initiator of the new Venetian painting: we find in them studies of figures and of movements, landscapes, architectures partly drawn from life, in which the Gothic and the antique are mingled. The artist knows especially how to render atmosphere, preparing the way for what was one of the most notable conquests of the great Venetian painting.

GENTILE, son of Jacopo, born in Venice, almost certainly in 1429, died there on 23 February 1507. He followed his father in art and underwent the influence of his brother-in-law Mantegna, as is seen especially in the organ shutters now in the museum of the Opera of St. Mark's. His first work, dated 1465 and signed, is the large tempera representing the Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani, now in the Accademia of Venice. The Saint is represented in profile with sharp contours. This painting presents Mantegnesque reminiscences and those realistic tendencies that would assert themselves in the portraits, in which the artist was very skilled. Famous is the Portrait of Mehmed II (London gallery), which Gentile painted at the invitation of that sultan in 1479.

Dated 1496 is one of the three teleri executed for the confraternity of St. John the Evangelist: the Procession of the Relic of the Cross in Piazza San Marco. In this painting one sees Gentile's skill as a view-painter of documentary exactness: the square is scrupulously represented with all the particularities of its buildings, so much so that on the facade of St. Mark's we can discern in their places all the original mosaics. Although the artist strives to render movement and to break the uniformity of the procession by varying the attitudes of the figures, as we see in the bearers of the baldachin, nevertheless his figures, among which some are painted with a portrait intent, remain awkward and uncertain in their movements. For the same confraternity Gentile painted in 1500 the Recovery of the Relic in the Canal, also interesting as a view, in which perspectival uncertainties and some archaism in the figures persist. Dated 1501 is the third canvas representing the Miracle of the Liberation of Pietro da Lodovico from Fever. In the Preaching of St. Mark of the Brera gallery the intervention of his brother Giovanni serves to confer movement and organic unity on the scene. Gentile marks a kind of transition between the flowering Gothic and the Renaissance of Mantegna; he seeks to represent the crowd, but does not succeed in interpreting it as a unity, because of the pedantic symmetry and the rigidity of his motionless arrays of figures.

GIOVANNI (called Giambellino), brother of Gentile, born in Venice around 1429; he is recorded for the first time in 1459; died on 20 November 1516. The dates of his fifteenth-century works are uncertain. Already in his first paintings, which, like almost all the others, were of sacred subject, his predilection for pictorial effect is revealed (for example, the Madonna holding the sleeping Child on her lap, of the Accademia of Venice). He was sensitive, in the second period of his activity, to the influences of Mantegna, as some Madonnas and the Transfiguration of the Correr museum prove, in which the figures are rough and betray the effort to render relief, while the characteristic pictorial quality of Giambellino is seen only in the background. Equally Mantegnesque is the Agony in the Garden of the London gallery, but the landscape has a broader breath, the chiaroscuro is pictorial and the lights are no longer harsh, the Apostles, though presenting Mantegnesque foreshortenings, are more human, the landscape is airy and the whole painting presents greater variety and fluency. More closely adhering to religious inspiration than Mantegna, the artist appears to us in the Pietà of the Doge's Palace in Venice, rich in tragic feeling, set against a landscape background. The Pietà of the Poldi Pezzoli museum in Milan still preserves remnants of the Mantegnesque squaring, but the light and the chiaroscuro soften the contours; likewise in the Crucifixion of the Correr museum, the originality of the luminous landscape and the diffused light make one forget the not yet abandoned mannerisms; in the Pietà of the same collection, the figure of Christ splendidly renders, without harshness, the abandonment of death. The Pietà of Brera marks a further progress, also for the greater freedom of composition and for a deeper expressiveness.

In the Transfiguration of the Naples picture gallery Mantegna is almost forgotten; the landscape predominates and throughout the picture a luminosity is diffused, which is accentuated in the central figure of Christ. The Madonna of the Bergamo gallery already anticipates the type of his most celebrated Madonnas.

The series of great altarpieces begins with the St. Job altarpiece, now in the Venice gallery, in which the composition extends with breadth and the sense of color is already almost tonal. The celebrated altarpiece of the sacristy of the Frari, signed and dated 1488, shows a further progress in the force of the coloring. Mantegnesque traces are still noted in the St. Zeno altarpiece, but the artist there increasingly humanizes the divine personages, so much so that the Virgin appears above all pervaded by maternal feeling. The colorism that would produce the great century of Venetian painting is here already fully formed: a light warm as old gold rises from the painted apse within which the Virgin stands out and lets emerge, with even more vivid force, the color of the saints of coppery tonality.

The Sacred Allegory of the Uffizi is a mystical reverie that in the landscape foreshadows Titian and in the gradation of tints and the sweetness of the shadings initiates tonal painting (v. VENEZIA, ARTE di). The same softness of chromatic transitions, together with a unitarily fused coloring, is found in the Madonna with Two Saints of the Venice gallery; and it intensifies in the justly celebrated Madonna of the Little Trees of the same gallery, especially in the face of the Virgin, which almost loses the sharpness of its contours.

In the St. Zaccaria altarpiece, signed and dated 1505, the painter returns to the manner of that of St. Job, but at the sides he represents stretches of sky and little trees. In the St. Jerome with St. Augustine and St. Christopher of the church of S. Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice, signed and dated 1513, Giambellino rivals Giorgione, so much so that St. Christopher is already to be included within the orbit of the new sixteenth-century painting.

For Giambellino beauty and piety are identified with one another and unite to form a perfect work of art. - See Plates LXXV-LXXVI.

Vincenzo Golzio