Giovanni
Bellini was initially taught by his father Jacopo
Bellini whose icon-like method and manner influenced his early work.
When Giovanni’s sister Nicosia married Andrea
Mantegna in 1453, close relations between Venice and Padua were established,
and Giovanni began to explore the physical and special representation of
the Early Renaissance. Under Mantegna’s influence his style assumed temporarily
a certain calligraphic precision: Transfiguration
(c 1460).
The visit of Antonello da Messina to Venice in 1475/76 seems to have liberated
Giovanni’s innermost talents. Without abandoning the rational structure
and interaction of form and space, his colors gain in luminosity and depth;
modulation of tone increasingly replaces the dividing outline, light floods
the canvas. The landscape, as can be seen in many of his representations
of the Virgin and Christ and the Pietà,
achieved a quality that marks Bellini as the most important Italian landscape
painter of the Early Renaisance. His ability to endow his figures with
an expression of quiet contemplation while fully conveying movement and
human anatomy, remains a secret that raises him above all his contemporaries.
The great works of his late art, in particular his portrayals of the Sacra
Conversazione, already cross the border from Early to High
Renaissance in the way artistic freedom and convention merge. As teacher
of Giorgione and Titian,
Giovanni, whom Dürer on his
second visit to Venice from 1505 till 1507 still called the greatest painter
of his time, was of immeasurable significance for Venetian art in the 16th
century. More than 200 of his works survived till our days, among them
50 images of Madonna with Infant.
Doge Leonardo Loredan.
“His first works…” writes Vasari of Giovanni Bellini, “… were certain portraits,
which met with great praise, in particular one which depicts Doge Leonardo
Loredan”. This picture was painted in 1501, when the Doge (who was proud
of his Roman descent) took office, or shortly thereafter. It can indeed
be considered one of the greatest achievements of Venetian painting, and
not just in the field of portraiture. Tutto spirito (all intellect) was
the verdict passed on it even by contemporaries. "Thin, tall of stature,
of no great fortune, choleric, but as a ruler clever and wise”, was how
Leonardo Loredan (1438-1521) was described by one contemporary. He was
Doge until 1521, and in the 12 or so years following the painting of this
portrait, he was to guide the Republic through the War of Encirclement
waged by the League of Cambrai.
See: Giovanni Bellini. Doge Leonardo
Loredan.
Bibliography:
Giovanni Bellini. by G. Robertson. Oxford. 1968.
Giovanni Bellini. Old Italian Masters. by V. Lazarev. Moscow
1972. (in Russian)
The Art of the Italian Renaissance. Architecture. Sculpture. Painting.
Drawing. Könemann. 1995.
Painting of Europe. XIII-XX centuries. Encyclopedic Dictionary.
Moscow. Iskusstvo. 1999. (in Russian)
Venetian
Painting in the Fifteenth Century: Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini
and Andrea Mantegna
by Otto Pacht, Margareta Vyoral-Tschapka, Michael Pacht. Harvey Miller,
2003.
Giovanni
Bellini (Artist's Library, No. 2.) by Roger Eliot Fry.
Ursus Press, 1995.
Giovanni
Bellini by Rona Goffen. Yale University Press, 1989.
Giovanni
Bellini by Anchise Tempestini. Gallimard, 2000.
The
Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini (Cambridge Companions
to the History of Art) by Peter Humfrey. Cambridge University Press , 2003.
Bellini,
Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting
by David Alan Brown, Sylvia Ferino-Pagden. Yale University Press, 2006.