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BELLINI, Giovanni: signature or monogram (Copyright www.ArtistsSignatures.com)

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Giovanni BELLINI: signature or monogram

The son of Jacopo Bellini and the brother of Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Bellini is widely regarded as the most important artist of the family. He helped establish the Renaissance style in Venetian painting and popularise the oil painting medium, while operating perhaps the largest workshop in Renaissance Italy. He lived in Venice his entire career, apparently travelling outside the Veneto only once, to complete an altarpiece for S Francesco in Pesaro.

Giovanni’s date of birth and career before about 1470 are poorly documented. Giovanni is not mentioned in the 1471 will of Anna Rinversi, Jacopo’s wife, which has been interpreted to mean that Giovanni was Jacopo’s illegitimate son, but it is now generally accepted that Giovanni was simply the younger brother and so Gentile was named as their mother’s heir. He trained with his father, and his earliest known works were collaborations with Jacopo and Gentile, including an altarpiece for the Gattamelata Chapel in Padua (1459–1460) and narrative canvases for the Scuola Grande di S Giovanni Evangelista.

Giovanni’s painting was in constant development, influenced in turn by Andrea Mantegna, who had married Giovanni’s sister Nicolosia in 1453, Antonello da Messina, and finally Giorgione. This is not to say that he submitted passively to these influences or was a servile imitator of the three painters; rather, he freely incorporated aspects of their painting and was thus able to stay at the forefront of Venetian painting for decades. Between 1465 and 1470 his somewhat hard, linear style shows the influence of Mantegna. This is the period of the Pietà (Milan, Brera), Christ Giving His Blessing (Louvre), and the Agony in the Garden (National Gallery, London). His major surviving work of the period, which also has elements of Netherlandish painting, is the S Vincenzo Ferrer Altarpiece for SS Giovanni e Paolo. In 1470, Giovanni worked with Gentile on the decoration of the Scuola Grande di S Marco, which the brothers had begun with their father. In 1474, Giovanni succeeded his brother as painter of the Story of Alexander III cycle in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio (Great Council Hall) of the Doge’s Palace. His Pesaro Altarpiece (or Coronation of the Virgin) dates to c. 1473–1476, and signals how Giovanni established himself as a painter not only of small-scale devotional paintings but also of public altarpieces. Thus he was able to gain recognition while Gentile was abroad in the late 1470s, and distinguished himself from his older brother, who worked primarily as a portraitist and painter of large narrative canvases.

The second major influence on in Giovanni’s style was Antonello da Messina, who arrived in Venice in 1475 and brought new solutions to the problems of colour, the unity given by light, and the advantages of painting in oil, as demonstrated in his S Cassiano Altarpiece (fragments in Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Bellini was quick to understand how Antonello’s techniques would help him to express his essentially religious sensibility in his painting. While retaining a clarity of line and composition, he managed to give a surrounding luminous quality to paintings such as the Naples Transfiguration, in which the rather melancholy softness affects both the figures and the landscape. From this period, 1475 to 1490, came the Rimini Pietà and the San Giobbe Altarpiece In 1496, when he was at the height of his artistic career and had been appointed official painter to the Signoria, Giovanni received from Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, a commission for a painting on a mythological subject. However, he drew back from what for him would have been a new development, and in 1504 he instead delivered a Nativity (untraced). Aside from religious works, Giovanni painted numerous portraits of Venetian elites, such as Doge Leonardo Loredan.

Giovanni was one of the first Renaissance artists to give such an important role to landscape as a plastic and unifying compositional element. The Baptism of Christ (c. 1500–1502) for a side altar in S Corona, Vicenza, shows Giovanni’s mastery of light and use of landscape to achieve a serene and sacred mood. From Giorgione, who may have been his pupil, Giovanni learned to exploit fully the relationships between diffused lighting and colour. Forms dissolve in the chiaroscuro with an ever-increasing softness. Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist and a Female Saint (Venice, Accademia) is perhaps the best example of this late style. Giovanni has simplified the volumes of the buildings in the background by using only two colours: a golden orange for walls catching the sun and a bluer orange for those in the shade. The S Zaccaria Altarpiece belongs to this period. About 1505, he met Albrecht Dürer, who considered him one of the greatest painters of his time. Late in his life, Giovanni finished St Mark Preaching for the Scuola di S Marco, a painting Gentile had asked him in his will to complete, and contributed to the history canvases for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace (destroyed 1577). At the end of his life, he also painted a few mythological works, including the Feast of the Gods for the studiolo of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in 1514, and the Young Woman at Her Toilette (or Nude with a Mirror), perhaps representing the goddess Venus, in 1515.

Giovanni Bellini was a pivotal figure in the development of Venetian art, bridging his father’s transitional style with 16th-century masters like Giorgione and Titian.