Giovanni bellini Biography

Giovanni Bellini

(Venice, Italy, c.1430-1516) Italian painter.In the Italian painting of the second half of the 15th century, Giovanni Bellini, promoter of the Venetian school and famous painter of Madonnas, achieved special renown, who created a pictorial language based on the fusion of the human figure with the landscape, giving great importance to the light and color.

Detail of a Self-portrait by Bellini

Also called Giambellino, he was born into a family of painters; his father, Jacopo, a draftsman and disciple of the Florentine Gentile da Fabriano, played an important role as an introducer of Renaissance aesthetics in Venice.His brother Gentile Bellini was an important portraitist who collaborated with him in the decoration of the ducal palace and even traveled to Constantinople to portray his sultan.

The first works of Bellini, made with the tempera technique, left his father's workshop, a place of learning, work and training until he went to Padua, around 1460.There he met the painter Andrea Mantegna, his future brother-in-law, from whom he learned to master drawing, as can be seen in Oración del Orchard de los Olivos , and who in turn taught the light of the Venetian school.Bellini was at that time a great landscaper, a virtue that he transmitted years later to the disciples of his workshop.Towards the middle of the 1470s he painted the famous polyptych dedicated to the Spanish Dominican Saint Vicente Ferrer, in the Church of Saints John and Paul in Venice.In those years his father died, whose workshop Giovanni directed since then.

The arrival in Venice of the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, connoisseur of the oil painting technique used in Flanders by Jan van Eyck, allowed Bellini to delve into it and develop greater virtuosity than with the use of tempera, such as in his Transfiguration of the Neapolitan museum of Capodimonte.In the early 16th century, his relationship with disciples such as Titian made him soften his painting, losing the angular features of Mantegna ( Madonna of Brera, in Milan).He died in 1516, in his hometown, leaving the Venetian school in motion, which had a wide resonance throughout the Cinquecento.

The work of Giovanni Bellini

Without doubt, the most brilliant star of Venetian painting of the fifteenth century is Giovanni Bellini, whose artistic evolution was characterized by a continuous renewal due to the various artistic experiences that his permeable personality assimilated in the course of a fairly long life, in which he remained permanently active.A student of his father Jacopo, he too experienced in the first period of his career a strong attraction for the painting of his brother-in-law Mantegna and for the sculpture of Donatello, of whom he knew how to translate the values ​​of plasticity through the energetic graphic definition of the planes of the modeling, although he softened them with a new light sensitivity that does not hide the firmness of the pictorial matter.

From this initial stage, which lasted until 1480, are the four triptychs for the Church of La Caridad (Accademia Gallery, Venice), with a manifest Mantegnesco spirit but softened by more flexible drawing contours and a measured treatment of perspective, to which Bellini adds some exquisite figures that with their looks and attitudes bring a melancholic grace and a expressive sensitivity that will be a fundamental contribution of his art.

These features are perpetuated in the polyptych of San Vicente Ferrer in the Venetian church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, where there is also an echo of Piero della Francesca's spaciousness; in the Christ blessing (Louvre Museum, Paris), with a face that exudes humanity and nobility; and finally in the innovative Piedad (Pinacoteca de Brera, Milan), made around 1470, in which the conjunction between Mantegna's sculptural modeling and the contained Bellinian emotion reaches its peak, so that the lament before the body of Jesus Christ is transformed into a sacred conversation of a wisely contained pathos.

Piedad (c.1470)

It is in any case a repertoire of expressive and plastic possibilities that the artist developed and graduated in his representations of the Virgin Mary and Child, so numerous and successful that made him the quintessential Venetian madonnieri (painter of virgins).In all of them, from the oldest, Giovanni Bellini explored a surprising variety of iconographic solutions, becoming a subtle and delicate inquirer of the intimate affectionate relationship between Mother and Son, often represented half-length.It is worth mentioning the Madonna Potenziani (Col.Lehman, New York) and the Madonna enthroned with the sleeping Child (Accademia Gallery, Venice) among those from the first period that, like many others, reveal a direct influence of Antonello da Messina in characteristics such as the blue tones of the Virgin's mantle.

A fundamental twist in the artist's progress is constituted by the large shovel with the Coronation of the Virgin (Museo Cívico, Pesaro), painted around 1474 after a stay in Marche during which he was able to study the art of Piero della Francesca.Of course, the grandiose spatial conception and the formal fullness of this work reflect a precise knowledge of Piero and Urbino's painting, although Giovanni Bellini has been able to impregnate it with a new feeling, with a sweetness no less imposing but strange to the impassive a both schematic of that one.

In the Weeping for the Dead Christ (Vatican Museums), which constituted the upper part of the Pesaro altar, subtle lighting effects achieve a warm modeling and a static and solemn calm, which It is also displayed in the wide perspective arrangement of the Transfiguration (around 1474, National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples), with characters in which a climate of sacred idyll beats in which the joyful participant becomes a whole nature.In this last work, the harmonious fusion of human figures with a domestic landscape inspired by the Venetian hills is clear, sweetly modulated under the overflowing luminosity of the sky, which made the least of the Bellini the initiator of Venetian landscaping and one of the greatest painters.of this genre.

Transfiguration (c.1474)

Around 1475, Antonello da Messina appeared on the scene, that through the dismembered shovel of San Casiano introduces Flemish preciousness to Venice and a series of compositional and iconographic novelties that will enrich Bellini's pictorial language.Apparently, in a work that disappeared almost contemporary with Antonello's, he already placed the characters in a unified and defined spatial environment.

In any case, this scheme will be the one chosen by Bellini for the execution of the most solemn and grandiose altar decorations of the Venetian Quattrocento: the pala de San Job (Accademia Gallery, Venice), made for the church of San Giobbe and dated around 1480, in which it takes up the treatment of the sacra conversione with the Virgin Mary surrounded by saints and seated on a high throne arranged before an apse, and the shovel of Saint Zacharias , completed in 1505 for the church homonymous, where the contours continue to soften, the colors are permeated with steam and the pictorial atmosphere becomes more enveloping and nuanced, so that the figures are submerged in an environment rich in morbid shadows and blurred and in Renaissance architecture.These are values ​​in which the conquest of what has been called "tonal painting" is already perceptible, which will triumph with the great masters of the Venetian Cinquecento.

In his last and no less prodigious years of activity, the master continued to expand and modulate his landscapes in sweet cadences of hills illuminated by a warm meridian light, as can be seen in the large shovel with the Baptism of Christ in the Church of Santa Corona in Vicenza, dating from the first decade of the 16th century.

Sacred allegory (c.1500)

A perfect and at the same time unusual conjunction between space and tonal play we find it, for example, in the admirable Sacred Allegory (around 1500, Uffizi Gallery, Florence), undoubtedly inspired by Venetian humanists.The meaning of this painting has not yet been fully identified; thematic reading is hampered by the complexity of diverse religious, mythological and landscape figures.The whole is surrounded by a luminous atmosphere, how much Giorgione will love.The figures are immersed in the soft air of a summer sunset, and fit serenely into the scenery of the mountains, the clean waters and the transparent sky that is reflected in the water, in contrast to the checkered ground in the foreground.The tonal richness of Giorgione and Lotto and the mysterious poetic climate of Venetian mythological compositions are undoubtedly announced.

In other works, the landscape is enriched with buildings copied from reality or with georgic episodes , especially in the sacra conversione and in the last virgins with the Child, for which Bellini increasingly adopted a landscape format in order to leave more space for the landscape and, in this way, express with total comfort in their representations the encounter and intimate communion between heavenly creatures and earthly reality.In this regard, see above all the Madonna del Prado (around 1500-1505, National Gallery, London), and the Madonna with Child blessing (1510, Pinacoteca de Brera , Milan), in which echoes of Giorgione are noticed.

Madonna del Prado (c.1500-1505)

In the Madonna del Prado , one of the best Madonnas painted by the Venetian artist, it is possible to observe, as was usual in the works that address this theme, a complex symbolism referring to the fight between good and evil (represented in the second place, on the left, by a small airón and a serpent), and to death, symbolized by the black crow perched on a dry tree.But what is most striking is the quality of the landscape representation that frames Mary and Jesus, and the tender charm that both figures give off.The Virgin is no longer the enthroned queen of the medieval period, but a young mother who watches over her son's sleep.As for the landscape, of a powerful realism, it denotes the interest of the Venetian school for the representation of the environment, beyond the abstract Gothic background.Color is the main protagonist of the composition: Maria's clothes, for example, are of a singular richness.In its warm tones the contours of the drawing melt, in an omen of what, a few decades later, will be the painting of the great Titian.

Giovanni Bellini's personality, always powerful but always changing, was capable of concentrating in his hands and bequeathing to Venetian painting a whole repertoire of technical and expressive resources that had never before been brought together in the same painter.For this reason, his style would prevail in the city of the lagoon and would mark the evolution of numerous authors, among which it is worth mentioning Cima da Conegliano (1459-1517) or others such as Giovanni Buonconsiglio, Andrea Previtali, Marco Basaiti or Bartolomeo Montagna.More important are the names of some of his direct disciples, such as Palma el Viejo or Sebastiano del Piombo and, above all, Giorgione and Tiziano, capable of delving into the teachings of their mentor.It was precisely Titian who was commissioned to complete one of the few paintings on a profane subject by Bellini, the Feast of the Gods (National Gallery of Art, Washington), signed and dated in 1513.The fact that the The greatest genius of the 16th century Venetian could carry out Bellini's work without appreciable differences in language constitutes a proof of the modernity to which the old master was able to gradually adapt in the final years of his life.