Giovanni Bellini
The founder of Venetian painting.
Giovanni Bellini brought oil paint and warm light into Venetian painting. His pupils included Giorgione and Titian.
Giovanni Bellini was born in Venice around 1430–35 into a family of artists. His father, Jacopo Bellini, was a leading painter, and his brother Gentile also became a painter. The family was closely connected with Andrea Mantegna, who in 1453 married Giovanni’s sister Nicolosia. Mantegna’s sharp, sculptural style shaped Giovanni’s early works.
One example is The Agony in the Garden in the National Gallery in London, from around 1465, which has almost the same subject as Mantegna’s painting in the same museum. Even here, though, Bellini’s individuality shows: the dawn light over the landscape matters more than the outlines. During the 1470s he learned more about oil paint, perhaps through contact with Antonello da Messina, who visited Venice in 1475–76. His large altarpieces, such as the Frari Triptych of 1488 and the San Zaccaria Altarpiece of 1505, are still in their original locations in Venice.
Bellini created what became the hallmarks of Venetian painting: warm light, deep colour and a sense of air and atmosphere. His Madonnas often sit in front of a landscape in soft evening light. In St Francis in the Desert, now in the Frick Collection in New York, it is the landscape and the light that carry the picture’s spiritual content. He also painted portraits, among them Doge Leonardo Loredan in London, in which the fabric of the doge’s robe almost glitters.
Bellini was the official painter of Venice and ran a large workshop. His paintings in the great hall of the Doge’s Palace were destroyed by fire in 1577. Albrecht Dürer visited him in 1506 and wrote that he was very old but still the best painter. He remained active into old age and painted The Feast of the Gods, now in Washington, in 1514. He died in 1516.
His pupils and followers included Giorgione and Titian. Bellini is therefore a key figure. He transformed Venice from a provincial centre of art into one that would stand on a par with Florence and Rome.