Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

2. The Bellini

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Next to St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace, the glory of Venetian art

was in painting. Many forces conspired to make the painters the

favorites of Venetian patronage. The Church, here as elsewhere, had to

tell the Christian story to its people, of whom only a few could read;

she needed pictures and statuary to continue the passing effect of

speech; so each generation, and many churches and monasteries, had

to have Annunciations, Nativities, Adorations, Visitations,

Presentations, Massacres of the Innocents, Flights into Egypt,

Transfigurations, Last Suppers, Crucifixions, Entombments,

Resurrections, Ascensions, Assumptions, Martyrdoms. When detachable

paintings faded, or grew stale to a congregation, they might be sold

to collectors or museums; they were periodically cleaned and

occasionally repainted or retouched; their authors, if reincarnated,

might not recognize them today. This, of course, did not apply to

murals, which usually disintegrated on their walls. Sometimes, to

avoid this fatality, the picture was painted upon canvas and this

was then fixed to the wall, as in the Hall of the Great Council. In

Venice the state rivaled the Church in appetite for murals, for

these could feed patriotism and pride by celebrating the grandeur

and ceremonies of the government, the triumphs of trade or war. The

scuole, too, might order murals and painted banners to commemorate

their patron saints or their annual pageantry. Rich men wanted

scenes of outdoor beauty or indoor love pictured on the walls of their

palaces; and they sat for portraits to cheat for a while the ironic

brevity of fame. The Signory ordered a portrait of every doge in turn;

even the Procurators of St. Mark so preserved their features for a

careless posterity. It was in Venice that the portrait and the easel

picture achieved most popularity.

Until the middle of the fifteenth century painting developed

slowly in Venice; then, like some flower catching the morning sun,

it burst into unparalleled radiance as Venetians found in it a vehicle

of the color and life that they had learned to love. Perhaps some of

that Venetian flair for color had come to the lagoons from the East,

with merchants who imported Oriental ideas and tastes as well as

goods, who brought back with them memories of gleaming tiles and

gilded domes, and displayed in Venetian markets, churches, or homes

Oriental silks, satins, velvets, brocades, and cloth of silver or

gold. Indeed Venice never quite made up its mind whether it was an

Occidental or an Oriental state. On the Rialto East and West did meet;

Othello and Desdemona could become man and wife. And if Venice and her

painters could not learn color from the East, they could get it from

the Venetian sky, observing its infinite variety of light and mist,

and the splendor of sunsets touching campaniles and palaces, or

mirrored in the sea. Meanwhile the victories of Venetian arms and

fleets, and the heroic recovery from threatened ruin, roused the pride

and imagination of patrons and painters, and commemorated themselves

in art. Wealth discovered that it was meaningless unless it could

transform itself into goodness, beauty, or truth.

An external stimulus was added to generate a Venetian school of

painting. In 1409 Gentile da Fabriano was brought to Venice to

decorate the Hall of the Great Council, and Antonio Pisano, called

Pisanello, came from Verona to collaborate. We cannot say how well

they performed, but it is probable that they stirred the Venetian

painters to replace with softer contours and richer colors the dark

and rigid hieratic forms of the Byzantine tradition, and the pale

and lifeless forms of the Giottesque school. Perhaps some minor

influence came down over the Alps with Giovanni d'Alamagna (d.

1450); but Giovanni seems to have grown up, and learned his art, in

Murano and Venice. With his brother-in-law Antonio Vivarini he painted

for the church of San Zaccaria an altarpiece whose figures begin to

have the grace and tenderness that would make the work of the

Bellini a revelation to Venice.

The greatest influence of all came from Sicily, or Flanders.

Antonello da Messina grew up as a businessman, and presumably had no

thought, in his youth, that his name would be carried down for

centuries in the history of art. While in Naples he saw (if we

accept Vasari's perhaps romantic account) an oil painting that had

been sent to King Alfonso by some Florentine merchants in Bruges. From

Cimabue (c. 1240- c. 1302) to Antonello (1430-79) Italian painting

on wood or canvas had relied on tempera- mixing the colors with a

gelatinous substance. Such colors left a rough surface, were

maladapted to blending for delicate shades and gradations, and

tended to crack and slake off even before the artist's death.

Antonello saw the advantages of mixing pigments with oil: readier

blending, easier handling and cleaning, brighter finish, greater

permanence. He went to Bruges, and there studied the oil technique

of the Flemish painters, then basking in the heyday of Burgundy.

Having occasion to go to Venice, he became so enamored of the city-

being himself "greatly addicted to women and pleasure"- `051128 that

he spent there the remainder of his life. He abandoned business, and

gave all his industry to painting. For the church of San Cassiano he

painted in oil an altarpiece that became a model for a hundred similar

pictures: the Madonna enthroned between four saints, with musician

angels at her feet, and full Venetian colors on the brocades and

satins of the drapery. Antonello shared his knowledge of the new

method with other artists, and the great age of Venetian painting

began. Many nobles sat to him for their portraits, and several of

these pictures survive: the crude, strong Poet at Pavia, the

Condottiere in the Louvre, the Portrait of a Man, plump and

quizzical, in the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia, the Portrait of

a Young Man in New York, and the Self-Portrait in London. At the

height of his success Antonello fell sick, developed pleurisy, and

died at the age of forty-nine. The artists of Venice gave him a

sumptuous funeral, and acknowledged their debt in a generous epitaph:

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In this ground is buried Antoninus the painter, the highest ornament

of Messina and all Sicily; celebrated not only for his pictures, which

were distinguished by singular skill and beauty, but because, with

high zeal and tireless technique, through mixing colors with oil, he

first brought splendor and permanence to Italian painting. `051129

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Among the pupils of Gentile da Fabriano at Venice was Iacopo

Bellini, founder of a brief but major dynasty in Renaissance art.

After this tutelage Iacopo painted in Verona, Ferrara, and Padua.

There his daughter married Andrea Mantegna; and through him, as well

as more directly, Iacopo came under Squarcione's influence. When he

returned to Venice he brought with him, if we may mingle metaphors,

a rubbing of the Paduan technique, and an echo of the Florentine.

All this, and the Venetian heritage, and, later, Antonello's tricks

with oil, passed down to Iacopo's sons, the rival geniuses Gentile and

Giovanni Bellini.

Gentile was twenty-three when the family moved to Padua (1452). He

felt intimately the influence of his brother-in-law Mantegna; when

he painted the shutters for the organ in the Padua cathedral he

followed too carefully the hard figures and bold foreshortenings of

the Eremitani frescoes. But in Venice a new gentleness appeared in his

portrait of San Lorenzo Giustiniani. In 1474 the Signory assigned to

him and his half-brother Giovanni the task of painting or repainting

fourteen panels in the Hall of the Great Council. These canvases

were among the earliest Venetian pictures painted in oil. `051130 They

were destroyed by fire in 1577, but the sketches that remain show that

Gentile used for the pictures his characteristic narrative style, in

which some major incident is portrayed at the center, and a dozen

episodes play at the side. Vasari saw the paintings, and marveled at

their realism, variety, and complexity. `051131

When Sultan Mohammed II sent a request to the Signory for a good

portrait painter, Gentile was chosen. In Constantinople (1474) he

enlivened the Sultan's chambers and spirits with erotic pictures,

and made of him a portrait (London) and a medallion (Boston), both

showing a powerful character drawn by an expert hand. Mohammed died in

1481; his successor, more orthodox, obeyed the Moslem ban on the

painting of human figures, and scattered into oblivion all but those

two of the works done by Gentile in the Turkish capital. Luckily

Gentile had returned to Venice in 1480, heavy with gifts and

decorations from the old Sultan. He rejoined Giovanni in the Ducal

Palace, and completed his contract with the Signory. It rewarded him

with a pension of two hundred ducats a year.

In his old age he painted his greatest pictures. The guild of St.

John the Evangelist had what it believed to be a miracle-working relic

of the True Cross. It solicited Gentile to describe in three paintings

the healing of an invalid by the relic, a Corpus Christi procession

carrying it, and the miraculous finding of the lost fragment. The

first panel has yielded its splendor to time. The second, painted when

Gentile was seventy, is a brilliant panorama of dignitaries,

choristers, and candle bearers parading around the Piazza San Marco,

with St. Mark's in the background, appearing very much as it is today.

In the third picture, painted at seventy-four, the relic has fallen

into the San Lorenzo Canal; the people crowding the bywalks and

bridges are panic-stricken, and many kneel in prayer; but Andrea

Vendramin plunges into the water, recovers the relic, and then, buoyed

up by it, moves with uninfected dignity toward the shore. Every figure

in these crowded canvases is drawn with realistic fidelity. And

again the artist delights in surrounding the main event with

engaging episodes: a boat slipping away from its dock while the

gondolier watches the recovery of the relic; and a nude black Moor

poised to dive into the stream.

Gentile's last great picture (Brera) was painted at the age of

seventy-six for his own confraternity of St. Mark, and showed the

Apostle preaching in Alexandria. As usual it is a crowd; Gentile

preferred to take humanity wholesale. He died at seventy-eight (1507),

leaving the picture to be finished by his brother Gian.

Giovanni Bellini (Gian Bellini, Giambellino) was only two years

younger than Gentile, but outlived him by nine. In this span of

eighty-six years he ranged the whole gamut of his art, tried and

mastered a rich variety of genres, and brought Venetian painting to

its first peak. At Padua he absorbed Mantegna's technical teaching

without imitating his hard and statuesque style; and in Venice he

adopted with unprecedented success the new method of mixing pigments

with oil. He was the first Venetian to reveal the glory of color;

and at the same time he attained to a grace and accuracy of line, a

delicacy of feeling, a depth of interpretation, that, even in the

lifetime of his brother, made him the greatest and most sought-for

painter in Venice.

Churches and guilds and private patrons seemed never to tire of

his Madonnas; he bequeathed the Virgin in a hundred forms to a dozen

lands. The Venetian Academy alone has a host of them: Madonna with

the Sleeping Child, Madonna with Two Holy Women, Madonna con

Bambino, Madonna degli Alberetti, Madonna with St. Paul and St.

George, Madonna Enthroned... and, best of this group, the Madonna of

St. Job; this, we are told, is the first picture that Giovanni

painted in oils, and it is one of the most brilliantly colored works

in Venice- which is to say in the world. The little Museo Correr at

the western end of the Piazza San Marco has another Giambellino

Madonna, tender and sad and lovely; San Zaccaria has a variation

on the Madonna of St. Job; the church of the Frari has a Madonna

Enthroned, a little stiff and severe and hemmed in by gloomy

saints, but appealing in her rich blue robes. The zealous wanderer

will find many more of Gian's Virgins, in Verona, Bergamo, Milan,

Rome, Paris, London, New York, Washington. What more, in color,

could be said of Our Lady after this polygraphic devotion? Perugino

and Raphael would rival this multiplicity, and Titian, in that same

church of the Frari, would find something more to say.

Giovanni did not do so well with the Son. Christ Blessing, in

the Louvre, is middling, but the Sacred Conversation near it is

movingly beautiful. The famous Pieta in the Brera at Milan has

been warmly praised, `051132 but it shows a duet of charmless faces

holding up a dead Christ who seems to need nothing more, for perfect

physical condition, than to be freed from too much attention; this

harsh and crude burial picture- undated- belongs to Bellini's

Mantegnesque youth. How much more pleasing is the Santa Justina in a

private collection in Milan!- again somewhat stylized and posed, but

with a delicacy of features, a modest drooping of the eyelids, a

splendor of costume, that make this one of Gian's most successful

efforts. It was apparently a portrait, and Gian was now so skilled

in rendering a living face and soul that a hundred patrons begged to

share his immortality. Look again at Doge Loredano; with what

depth of understanding, and keenness of eye, and dexterity of hand

Bellini has caught the unfaltering, serene power of the man who

could lead his people to victory in a war for survival against the

united assault of nearly all the great states of Italy and transalpine

Europe!- And then, rivaling the Leonardo who was creeping up on him in

skill and fame, Giovanni tried his palette at bizarre landscapes

like that medley of rocks, mountains, castles, sheep, water, riven

tree, and clouded sky which St. Francis (in the Frick Collection)

calmly confronts as he receives the stigmata.

In his old age the master tired of repeating the usual sacred

themes, and experimented with allegory and classic mythology. He

turned Knowledge, Happiness, Truth, Slander, Purgatory, the Church

herself, into persons or stories, and sought to bring them to life

with alluring landscapes. Two of his pagan pictures hang in the

Washington National Gallery: Orpheus Charming the Beasts, and The

Feast of the Gods - a picnic of bare-breasted women and half-naked,

half-drunken men. The picture is dated 1514; it was painted for Duke

Alfonso of Ferrara when the artist was eighty-four years old. We are

reminded again of Alfieri's boast- that the man-plant grows more

vigorously in Italy than elsewhere on the earth.

Giovanni lived only a year after signing that testament of youth.

His was a full and reasonably happy life: an astonishing procession of

masterpieces, a kaleidoscope of warm colors on soft robes, an

immense advance in grace, composition, and vitality upon the

Giotteschi and the Byzantophiles, a power of perception and

individualization unseen in the arid figures and indiscriminate masses

of Gentile's pictures, a fruitful mediation, in time and style,

between a Mantegna who knew only Romans and a Titian who felt and

pictured every phase of life from Flora to Charles V. One of Gian's

pupils was Giorgione, who developed his master's idyls of wood and

stream; Titian worked with Giorgione, and received the great

tradition. Generation by generation Venetian art was accumulating

its knowledge, varying its experiments, and preparing its culmination.

3. From the Bellini to Giorgione

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The success of the Bellini made painting popular in Venice, where

mosaics had held so long a sway. Studios multiplied, patrons opened

their purses, and artists developed who, though they were not

Bellini or Giorgiones, would have been the brightest stars in lesser

galaxies. Vincenzo Catena painted so well that many of his pictures

were credited to Gian Bellini or to Giorgione. Antonio Vivarini's

younger brother, Bartolommeo, met a conservative demand by applying to

medieval themes the technique of Squarcione and the fuller colors that

painting had learned to mix and convey. Bartolommeo's nephew and

pupil, Alvise Vivarini, threatened for a time to rival Gian Bellini

with pretty Madonnas, and achieved a monumental altarpiece- Madonna

with Six Saints - which passed from Italy to the Kaiser-Friedrich

Museum in Berlin. Alvise was a good teacher, for three of his pupils

found moderate fame. Bartolommeo Montagna we leave to Vicenza.

Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano worked for the Madonna market;

one at Parma has a handsome figure of the Archangel Michael, while

another in Cleveland redeems itself with brilliant color. Marco

Basaiti painted a fine Calling of the Sons of Zebedee (Venice),

and a delightful portrait- A Youth - in the London National Gallery.

Carlo Crivelli may also have been a pupil of the Vivarini;

however, he had to abscond from Venice soon after his seventeenth year

(1457): having abducted the wife of a sailor, he was fined and jailed;

released, he sought safety in Padua, where he studied in

Squarcione's school. In 1468 he moved to Ascoli, and spent his

remaining twenty-five years painting pictures for the churches there

and thereabouts. Perhaps because he left Venice so soon, Crivelli

hardly shared in the progressive movement of Venetian painting; he

preferred tempera to oil, kept to the traditional religious

subjects, and adopted an almost Byzantine scheme of subordinating

representation to decoration. He gave his pictures an enamel finish,

which went well with the gilded frames of the polyptychs he filled;

and though his Madonnas seem cold, there is a delicate grace in

their drawing that presages Giorgione.

Vettor (Vittore) Carpaccio was a major among these minors.

Starting with studies in perspective and design in the manner of

Mantegna, he adopted the narrative style of Gentile Bellini, added

to it a youthful preference for imaginary idyls rather than

contemporary events, and applied to his romantic themes a fully

developed technique. Quite alien to his usually blithe spirit is an

early picture (in New York), Meditation on the Passion - a macabre

study of Sts. Jerome and Onofrius imagining Christ seated before

them dead, with skull and crossbones at their feet, and a background

of lowering clouds. When he was thirty-three (1488) Carpaccio received

an important commission: to paint for the School of St. Ursula a

series of pictures illustrating her history. In nine picturesque

panels he told how the handsome Prince Conon of England had come to

Brittany to wed Ursula, daughter of its king; how she begged him to

postpone the wedding until, with a train of 11,000 virgins, she

could make a pilgrimage to Rome; how Conon accompanied her lovingly,

and all received the papal blessing; how, then, an angel appeared to

Ursula and announced that she and her virgins must go to Cologne and

be martyred; how she leaves the sorrowing Conon and, with her train,

goes in calm dignity to Cologne; how its pagan kinglet proposes

marriage to her, and, when she refuses, slays all 11,001. The legend

suited Carpaccio's fancy; he delighted in picturing the crowds of

maidens and courtiers, and made nearly every one of them

aristocratic and fair and colorfully dressed; and to the various

scenes he brought not only his pictorial science but his knowledge

of actual things- the forms of architecture, the shipping in a bay,

the patient procession of the clouds.

In an interval of his nine years' labor with Ursula, Carpaccio

painted for the School of St. John the Evangelist The Healing of

the Demoniac by a relic of the Holy Cross. Daring comparison with

Gentile Bellini, Vittore described a scene on a Venetian canal,

crowded with people, gondolas, and palaces. Here was all of

Gentile's realism and detail, done with a brilliant finish beyond

the older man's reach. Stirred by Carpaccio's success, the School of

St. George of the Slavonians asked him to commemorate their patron

saint on the walls of their Venetian oratory. Again he took nine

years, and painted nine scenes. They do not quite equal the Ursula

series, but Carpaccio, now in his fifties, had not lost his flair

for representing graceful figures in harmonious combinations, and

architectural backgrounds fanciful in conception but convincing in

presentation. St. George attacks the dragon in an impetuous charge; in

contrast St. Jerome is shown as the quiet scholar immersed in study in

a surprisingly handsome room, with no other company than his lion.

Every feature in the room is pictured with minute fidelity, even to

the musical score so legible on a fallen scroll that Molmenti

transcribed it for the piano.

In 1508 Carpaccio and two obscure artists were appointed to set a

value on a strange mural painted by a rising young artist on an

outer wall of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi- the warehouse of the Teuton

merchants near the Rialto bridge. He judged it worth a fee of 150

ducats ($1875?). Though Carpaccio still had eighteen years of life

in him, he painted only one more great picture- a Presentation in the

Temple (1510) for the chapel of the Sanudo family in the church of

San Giobbe. There it had to compete with Gian Bellini's Madonna of

St. Job; and though the Virgin and her attendant ladies are lovely,

Giovanni, not Vittore, is victor in this silent contest. Carpaccio, in

a later century, might have been the master of the age; it was his

misfortune that he came between Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione.

4. Giorgione

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It might seem strange that artists should be hired at high fees to

paint a warehouse wall. But in 1507 the Venetians felt that life

without color was dead; and the German traders there, some from the

great Durer's Nuremberg, had their own lusty sense of art. So they

sublimated part of their profits into two murals, and had the luck

to choose immortals for the task. The paintings soon succumbed to salt

moisture and the sun, and only vague blotches remain, but even these

attest the early fame of Giorgione da Castelfranco. He was then

twenty-nine years old. We do not know his name; an old story made

him the love child of an aristocratic Barbarelli and a woman of the

people; but this may be an afterthought. `051133 In his thirteenth

or fourteenth year (c. 1490) he was sent from Castelfranco to Venice

to serve as apprentice to Gian Bellini. He developed rapidly, won

substantial commissions, bought a house, painted a fresco on its

front, and filled his home with music and revelry; for he played the

lute well, and preferred gay women in the flesh to the loveliest of

them on canvas. What influences formed his wistful style it is hard to

say, for he was unlike the other painters of his day, except that he

may have learned from Carpaccio some grace and charm. Probably the

decisive influence came from letters rather than from art. When

Giorgione was twenty-seven or twenty-eight Italian literature was

taking a bucolic turn; Sannazaro published his Arcadia in 1504;

perhaps Giorgione read these poems and found in their pleasant fancies

some suggestions of idealized landscapes and amours. From Leonardo-

passing through Venice in 1500- Giorgione may have acquired a taste

for a mystic, dreamy softness of expression, a delicacy of nuance, a

refinement of manner that made him, for a tragically brief moment, the

summit of Venetian art.

Among the earliest works attributed to him- for in hardly any case

can we be sure of his authorship- are two wood panels describing the

exposure and rescue of the infant Paris; the story is an excuse for

painting shepherds and rural landscapes breathing peace. In the

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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