Painter, born in Venice, NE Italy, the son of Jacopo Bellini and brother of Gentile Bellini. One of his chief contributions to Italian art was his successful integration of figures with landscape background. Another is his naturalistic treatment of light. Almost all his pictures are religious, although he painted the occasional pagan allegory. He is perhaps best known for a long series of Madonnas to which he brought a humanistic sensibility usually absent in Raphael's more austere renderings of the subject. All the most talented younger painters of his day - Giorgione and Titian among them - came to his studio, and through them his innovations were perpetuated.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516) was a Venetian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of painters. Through the use of clear, slow-drying oil paints, Giovanni created deep, rich tints and detailed shadings. His sumptuous coloring and fluent, atmospheric landscapes had a great effect on the Venetian painting school, especially on his pupils Giorgione and Titian...
Early career
Giovanni was brought up in his father's house, and always lived and worked in the closest fraternal relation with his brother Gentile. In Giovanni's earliest independent works we find him more strongly influenced by the harsh and searching manner of the Paduan school, and especially of his own brother-in-law Mantegna, than by the more graceful and facile style of Jacopo.
The earliest of Giovanni's independent works no doubt date from before this period. In all his early pictures Giovanni combines with the Paduan severity of drawing and complex rigidity of drapery a depth of religious feeling and human pathos which is his own.
In a somewhat changed and more personal manner, with less harshness of contour and a broader treatment of forms and draperies, but not less force of religious feeling, are the two pictures of the Dead Christ supported by Angels, in these days one of the master's most frequent themes, at Rimini and at Berlin. Two Madonnas, still executed in tempera, are no doubt earlier than the date of Giovanni's first appointment to work along with his brother and other artists in the Scuola di San Marco, where among other subjects he was commissioned in 1470 to paint a Deluge with Noah's Ark. None of the master's works of this kind, whether painted for the various schools or confraternities or for the ducal palace, have survived.
Maturity
To the decade following 1470 must probably be assigned a Transfiguration now in the Naples museum, repeating with greatly ripened powers and in a much serener spirit the subject of his early effort at Venice; and also the great altar-piece of the Coronation of the Virgin at Pesaro, which would seem to be his earliest effort in a form of art previously almost monopolized in Venice by the rival school of the Vivarini. Probably not much later was the still more famous altar-piece painted in tempera for a chapel in the church of S. Giovanni e Paolo, where it perished along with Titian's Peter Martyr and Tintoretto's Crucifixion in the disastrous fire of 1867.
After 1479-1480 very much of Giovanni's time and energy must have been taken up by his duties as conservator of the paintings in the great hall of the ducal palace, in payment for which he was awarded, first the reversion of a broker's place in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and afterwards, as a substitute, a fixed annual pension of eighty ducats. Besides repairing and renewing the works of his predecessors he was commissioned to paint a number of new subjects, six or seven in all, in further illustration of the part played by Venice in the wars of Frederick Barbarossa and the pope.
Of the other, the religious class of his work, including both altar-pieces with many figures and simple Madonnas, a considerable number have fortunately been preserved. gradually acquiring a complete mastery of the new oil medium introduced in Venice by Antonello da Messina about 1473, and mastering with its help all, or nearly all, the secrets of the perfect fusion of colors and atmospheric gradation of tones.
High Renaissance
An interval of some years, no doubt chiefly occupied with work in the Hall of the Great Council, seems to separate the altar-pieces of the Frari, of San Giobbe, and of the church of [[San Zaccaria at Venice]. Another great altar-piece with saints, that of the church of San Francesco de la Vigna at Venice, belongs to 1507; to 1513 that of San Giovanni Crisostomo at Venice, where the aged Saint Jerome, seated on a hill, is raised high against a resplendent sunset background, with SS.
Of Giovanni's activity in the interval between the altar-pieces of San Giobbe and of Murano and that of San Zaccania, there are a few minor evidences left, though the great mass of its results perished with the fire of the Doge's Palace in 1577.
Albrecht Dürer, visiting Venice for a second time in 1506, describes Giovanni Bellini as still the best painter in the city, and as full of all courtesy and generosity towards foreign brethren of the brush. In 1507 Gentile Bellini died, and Giovanni completed the picture of the Preaching of St. Mark which he had left unfinished; In 1513 Giovanni's position as sole master (since the death of his brother and of Alvise Vivarini) in charge of the paintings in the Hall of the Great Council was threatened by the desire of his own former pupil, Titian, for a share of the same undertaking, to be paid for on the same terms. In 1514 Giovanni undertook to paint The Feast of the Gods for the duke Alfonso I of Ferrara, but died in 1516, leaving it to be finished by his pupils;
Assessment
Both in the artistic and in the worldly sense, the career of Giovanni Bellini was upon the whole the most serenely and unbrokenly prosperous, from youth to extreme old age, which fell to the lot of any artist of the Early Renaissance.
In the historical perspective, Bellini was essential to the development of the Italian Renaissance for his incorporation of Northern Renaissance aesthetics. Significantly influenced by Antonello da Messina, who had spent time in Flanders, Bellini made prevalent both the use of oil painting, different from the tempera painting being used at the time by most Italian Renaissance painters, and the use of disguised symbolism integral to the Northern Renaissance.
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