The tender power of Giovanni Bellini.

I. This has been quite a time for those interested in the art of the Italian Renaissance: major exhibitions on the Renaissance portrait (at the Prado, Madrid and the National Gallery, London), the relationship between Florentine and Netherlandish painting (at the Palazzo Pitti, Florence), and love and marriage (The Metropolitan Museum, New York); and displays of the work of the north Italian sculptors Antico (Palazzo Ducale, Mantua) and Riccio (The Frick Collection, New York) as well as the painters Correggio (Galleria Borghese, Rome and Galleria Nazionale, Parma), that eccentric of Bolognese painting, Amico Aspertini (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna), Andrea Mantegna (Louvre, Paris) and Giovanni Bellini (Scuderie Papali al Quirinale, Rome). Even for those of us whose profession entails keeping abreast of these things, it has been an excess of riches, impossible to take in--which, of course, is why catalogues exist.Especially the conjunction of exhibitions devoted to Mantegna and Bellini provided an opportunity not to be missed. After all, the relative merits of the work of these two towering figures, who were related by marriage, were discussed already in the fifteenth century and have continued to engage modern critics. Even before I saw the exhibition in Rome and the marvelous works it brought together, my mind had already turned to Giovanni Bellini last summer, when I was contacted with a tip by two colleagues at the Frick Collection in New York. "You'll want to come down and see Saint Francis in the Desert," they said. "It's been removed from its normal room, which is under renovation, and is hanging in the rotunda. The light is marvelous and you'll see it in a new way." To judge from the response that this almost incidental event elicited, in the press and among aficionados of the Frick, Bellini's painting ranks very high indeed with art lovers in New York. It is, arguably, one of the two greatest Renaissance paintings in America, the other being Titian's The Rape of Europa in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. And the all-too-brief move of the Frick's painting from a room lit laterally by a suite of curtained windows looking out onto Fifth Avenue to a skylit gallery underscored the way illumination had the effect of transforming one's experience of a work of art, much as the acoustics in a concert hall can alter the way one hears a piece of music. Never, to my memory, had the dawn coloring the distant landscape and illuminating the towers of the walled city and castle that crown a cultivated hill--never had this dawn appeared quite so golden. Or the fields where a shepherd grazes his sheep, and a gray heron and donkey stand as though transfixed, looked so lush. The blue-tinged rock formations in the foreground, where the saint is shown standing, barefoot, before his rustic study--an arbor ingeniously constructed of branches lashed together to support a grape vine-- seemed both palpable and visionary in a way that I had not previously recognized. In its rapt attention to detail--the hollyhock and rosemary that grow from the carefully tended flower bed; the skull, book, and cross that adorn the saint's desk; the small kingfisher perched below the fountain spigot in a dank cleavage in the rocky ledge--this is a painting that invites slow and attentive viewing: total absorption, absolute engagement. The picture has often been called a hymn to nature and its subject identified, somewhat romantically and almost certainly incorrectly, as Saint Francis composing his famous "Canticle of All Created Things"--the poem that earned the thirteenth-century friar his place as the patron saint of environmentalists. In 1525, the picture was described quite simply as showing "Saint Francis in the desert [painted] in oil ... and it has a meticulously finished landscape [that is] marvelously observed." More likely than not, the actual subject is Saint Francis receiving the stigmata on Mount Alverna, an event that is said to have occurred in 1224. This would explain the small red marks on the saint's extended hands and foot, and it would explain why his wooden clogs have been removed: he stands on ground consecrated by the presence of the Holy Spirit. It would explain the rays of light--miraculous rays, not sunlight--that stream through the clouds to the left of the laurel tree that bends its spindly trunk as though in homage to the saint. It would explain the shepherd who pauses and turns to gaze toward the mountaintop grotto, and the docile donkey and bird who, like the shepherd, have mistaken the light bathing Saint Francis for the real light of dawn--as recounted in early Franciscan literature. The picture surface has been cropped along the top edge, and I have long believed that a minute seraph, such as is traditionally included in scenes of the stigmatization, was once shown in the missing area. Still, as one learned commentator has noted, although the picture is "full of narrative and historical allusions ... it is not itself a 'story' bound by space and time." Rather, the picture has been conceived as a meditation on the theme of Saint Francis's union with God. In other words, it is the manner of representation rather than the actual subject that is exceptional. Bellini has eliminated precisely the quality of dramatic moment that traditionally defined the event. On one point everyone agrees: the beauty of Bellini's picture resides in its vision of nature--a landscape experienced as intensely in the imagination of its creator as the hills above Tintern Abbey were experienced by Wordsworth on his return after five years' absence. It is as though, taking his point of departure from the simple but ecstatic language of Saint Francis's hymn to God's creation, Bellini had set out to convey the kind of oneness of Nature that is also at the heart of Wordsworth's verses. I am thinking especially of the lines in which the great Romantic poet declares, "I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:/A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things." Except, of course, that for Bellini that "motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things" is the "altissimo, omnipotente, bon Signore"--the highest, omnipotent, good Lord, to whom Saint Francis addressed his canticle. What sets Bellini's art apart from that of every other Renaissance painter is this quality of serenity--even when the subject might be thought to require dramatic presentation--coupled with an intense engagement with nature. Landscape for him is never simply a setting--an appropriate backdrop--for a religious narrative. Nor is it the mere transcription of a topographical site; indeed, no painting of his can be shown to depict a specific place. Rather, it is through the landscape backgrounds of Bellini's paintings that the mood is struck and the emotional tenor of his theme conveyed, whether the story concerns Saint Francis or a hermit saint in the wilderness, or the Crucifixion, or the Transfiguration, or the Baptism of Christ. (Not even Piero della Francesca can match the sacral stillness that pervades Bellini's haunting Baptism of Christ in the church of Santa Corona, in Vicenza, in which the life- size figures are set against a mountainous landscape, their ritualistic gestures arrested as though time itself had stopped.) In several of Bellini's most memorable altarpieces of the Madonna and Child with saints, the lateral walls of the fictive chapel in which the holy figures have assembled are eliminated so as to provide tantalizing views onto a distant landscape, further adding to the quality of meditative calm that is the hallmark of this painter's art. As noted by Roger Fry in his study of the artist written at the close of the nineteenth century--before he became the prophet of modernism and the champion of Cezanne--"Bellini shows already that perception of the emotional value of passing effects of atmosphere, which is often supposed to be a peculiarity of the art of this century." A couple of years ago, while standing in front of Bellini's masterpiece at the Frick, I overheard the conversation of someone enthusiastically taking a friend around the collection for what must have been his companion's first visit. He indicated that the Bellini was one of his favorite paintings. "Yeah," responded his friend, "but too bad he had to put that monk in the picture"--as though the figure of Saint Francis was an insertion or an afterthought to an otherwise beautiful landscape. So let us be very clear on the matter: Bellini's art is not first and foremost a celebration of nature. Nor did he ever paint, or even think of painting, a pure landscape. Recent scholarship has remarked upon the fact that his pictures invariably invite the viewer to make imaginary pilgrimages that involve choices between diverging paths, one often leading to an isolated hermitage, another to cultivated fields and urban sites, sometimes shown in a state of decay. In other words, Bellini's landscapes are constructs of the imagination, and they have a religious-moral dimension. They are informed by an idea of life as a pilgrimage in which the choices we make lead either to redemption or damnation. It is a theme of late medieval devotional literature, and it is found as well in fifteenthcentury Netherlandish painting, which Bellini deeply admired. The contrast that Bellini sets up in the Frick Saint Francis between the barren grotto in the foreground and the pastoral landscape in the background is, among other things, a lesson in the decisions that lead to union with God. A similar contrast is found in his paintings of the ascetic Saint Jerome seated before a grotto (often with a lizard or snake climbing on the rocks) and a lush landscape in the distance, as well as in his depictions of the Transfiguration and the Resurrection. Even in his paintings of the Madonna and Child--the most conventional of all subjects in Italian art and the mainstay of his busy workshop--there is often a landscape that offers the devout viewer sites for contemplation and reflection. Consider, for example, the marvelous Madonna and Child in the Metropolitan Museum, a work acquired in 1908 on the recommendation of Roger Fry. Painted in the late 1480s, it shows the Madonna seated behind a parapet. She solicits our attention with a sidelong glance as she gently cradles her infant son, who holds what I take to be a quince. The rustcolored cloth of honor behind the figures is drawn back at the left to reveal a distant landscape in which, to one side of a winding path, are bare trees and fallow fields, while on the other side the hills have turned green and a tree near the well-kept houses is in full foliage. Beyond the jagged profile of the Alps, the clouds are colored by the dawn of a new day. Just as we understand the bitter fruit that the Christ Child holds to stand for the Fall of Man, so in the landscape we discern an allegory of rebirth and redemption--but one rendered in such compellingly everyday terms that a modern viewer might be forgiven for not apprehending the moral implications. Henry James put it well in Italian Hours, when he noted that Bellini's pictures have "a richness of sanctity that is almost profane." That Bellini projected himself into his landscapes there really can be no doubt. And that he actually preferred treating devotional subjects as opposed to secular ones is documented by a series of revealing letters regarding a singular commission placed with him in 1501 by Isabella d'Este, the spoiled, demanding, art-loving marchioness of Mantua. She had in mind an elaborate allegory to complement two canvases by Andrea Mantegna for display in her private study, where she kept her finest works of art. No sooner had Bellini accepted the offer than he began a protracted effort to change the terms of the commission. Narrative painting was not his forte, he claimed; his picture would inevitably suffer by comparison with those of Mantegna--the court painter at Mantua celebrated for his ability to give visual form to abstract concepts. Isabella, who had already made an advance payment, was unhappy, then threatening, but eventually settled on a painting of the Nativity with small- scale figures in a landscape setting: something she could hang in her bedroom. Bellini agreed, and then once again attempted--this time unsuccessfully--to substitute a more standard depiction of half-length figures of the Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist in a landscape setting (a picture for which he could have recycled motifs already in hand). In the event, he delivered Isabella's painting three years behind schedule. Remarkably, not only was she satisfied with the result, but with admirable persistence she approached him a second time for an allegory. This time she enlisted the assistance of the great poet Pietro Bembo, who wrote the marchioness that the pictorial program that had been sent would have to be submitted for Bellini's approval as he disliked constraints on his imagination, and preferred, so he said, "to wander at will in his pictures," so that they might give satisfaction to others as well to himself. This exceptional series of letters says volumes about Bellini the artist. He was, first and foremost, an artist of devotional themes, the landscape settings of which involved self-projection--the artist as pilgrim--and presuppose a similar engagement by the viewer. The original way in which his paintings treat standard religious themes, such as the stigmatization of Saint Francis or the Madonna and Child, is the direct result of this peculiarly associative and empathetic approach to painting--something quite different from the narrative focus of Mantegna's art, with its emphasis on sharp emotion and dramatic moment. We might say that one was a master of prose, interested in probing the foibles of humankind, and the other a poet in search of spiritual harmony. What makes Bellini's engagement with nature so remarkable is that he was born and lived continuously in Venice--in a densely urban environment far from the lush landscapes that he depicts. Late in life he may have owned a villa on the terraferma, but unlike his father Jacopo, who was also a painter and as a youth had crossed the Apennines to Florence and later worked in Ferrara, Verona, and Padua, and unlike his brother Gentile, who in 1479 traveled as far as Istanbul to paint for the sultan, Giovanni Bellini seems to have been a sedentary artist. His workaday world was defined by the narrow alleys and campi of the Serenissima, as the Venetian state was called. And, of course, by the waters of the lagoon that surround the city, and by the canals that run through it. It comes as no surprise that he was able to capture, as no other fifteenth- century painter had done, the changing effects of light playing on the rippled surface of water--perhaps most astonishingly and precociously in the river in which Saint Christopher stands in Bellini's early altarpiece in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. (One need only walk outside the church to the canal that borders the campo to appreciate Bellini's powers of observation.) But how did he come to master the complex and ravishing landscapes of his mature paintings, such as the Frick Saint Francis--landscapes that take one well beyond the compositional formulas that he learned from his father, and the delicate, atmospheric backgrounds that he studied in the various Netherlandish paintings that were in the city? Was the catalyst a memorable trip south, along the Adriatic coast, to the town of Pesaro, for which, in the mid-1470s he painted one of his grandest works, the Coronation of the Virgin, still to be seen in the Museo Civico of the city? (This astonishing altarpiece--over sixteen feet high, Bellini's answer to the challenge of Mantegna's earlier polyptych in the church of San Zeno in Verona--opened the recent exhibition in Rome, paradoxically placing one of the climaxes of the exhibition before the artist's more tentative beginnings.) There is no documentary evidence that Bellini made such a trip, and the normal procedure would have been to paint the altarpiece in Venice and ship it to Pesaro. But I can think of no other possible explanation for the transformation that we see in his work. Either he traveled to Pesaro to sign the contract or to supervise the installation of the enormous altarpiece. Along the way he must have filled a notebook with detailed drawings of whatever captured his imagination, since he introduced buildings in Ravenna, Rimini, and Ancona into some of his later paintings. In Ancona and in Rimini he could have seen frescoes by Piero della Francesca, and these may have confirmed his desire to achieve an effect of simplicity, order, and luminosity in his paintings. There must also have been marvelous drawings of vegetation and of the varied, hilly landscape of the region of the Marches, to which he could refer when composing landscapes back in his urban studio. Bellini would have followed the same procedure when, at the end of the decade, he painted his marvelous Transfiguration (now in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples), for the cathedral of Vicenza, west of Venice. These trips would help to explain how it came to pass that in the late 1470s Bellini became, quite simply, the greatest landscape painter in Europe. Indeed, so complete is his mastery that we scarcely think to ask ourselves why it is that this close observer of nature never introduced his native city into his religious paintings. It was the itinerant Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina, who showed Saint Sebastian bound to a tree trunk incongruously growing in the middle of a paved Venetian campo, and it was Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio--not Giovanni Bellini--who have left us the most memorable images of the city. Attempts have been made to find parallels for Bellini's mature achievement as a painter of landscape in the poetry of his time, especially in the Petrarchan verses of Pietro Bembo, who became a close friend of the artist. Yet compared to Bellini's landscapes, Bembo's pastoral evocations seem shaped by poetic conventions, and they lack the quality of observation, the descriptive richness and the emotional depth, of the painter's work. It is Titian, not Bellini, who was the interpreter of the conventions of pastoral poetry. In a lecture delivered in 1833, no less a figure than Constable drew a fundamental distinction between Titian's and Bellini's landscapes by remarking that Bellini imitated nature "in what has been termed a servile manner." And in his still fundamental book on landscape painting published in 1949, Kenneth Clark attempted to describe how this "servility" to the appearance of nature acquired a poetic dimension. "Bellini's landscapes are the supreme instance of facts transfigured through love," he declared. He then elaborated on ideas culled from Ruskin's Modern Painters, observing that "few artists have been capable of such universal love, which embraces every twig, every stone, the humblest detail as well as the most grandiose perspective, and can only be attained by a profound humility." "Universal love ... profound humility." Not many will be satisfied with this leap from a description of style--a "servile manner"--to an analysis of character. And yet I have never encountered anyone who did not, on the basis of their deep response to Bellini's paintings, feel that he must have been a generous and even a spiritual man. Of course, the problem with this assumption is that it confuses Bellini the man, about whom we know very little indeed, with Bellini the professional artist, whose financial success depended on the devotional efficacy of his paintings. But if we should not underestimate the sheer power of Bellini's artistry, neither should we deny the possibility that he did indeed possess the rare qualities of spirit that find expression in his art. II. So what do we know about Giovanni Bellini, the man and the artist? He was the son--almost certainly illegitimate--of Jacopo Bellini, who played a key role in introducing the principles of Renaissance painting into Venice; and the half-brother of Gentile Bellini, his father's artistic heir; and the brother-in- law of Andrea Mantegna, who married his older sister Nicolosia. His cousin, Leonardo Bellini, was a talented illuminator of manuscripts and on occasion may have collaborated with Bellini. Painting in Venice was often a family affair, and this was certainly true of the Bellini family. When Jacopo died, his workshop activity was divided between his two sons, Gentile taking over the lucrative commissions for portraiture and narrative painting for the confraternities of the city, Giovanni specializing in the production of altarpieces and paintings for private devotion. Only in 1479, when Gentile left for Istanbul, did Giovanni assume his half-brother's commissions in the Doge's Palace and receive the kind of official recognition that he deserved. His activity as a portraitist also begins about this time. Like most Venetians of standing, he belonged to a religious confraternity-- in fact, to two. These probably provided him with useful business contacts as well as religious activities. (The man who commissioned the Frick Saint Francis was a prominent member of one of these organizations.) We have no tax returns, but the indications are that Bellini was an astute businessman: he ran a bustling workshop that dominated the market for devotional images of the Madonna and Child, and in 1482 he was, exceptionally, exempted from the statutes of the Venetian Guild of Painters. By that date he was widely regarded as the outstanding painter in Venice, and few aspiring artists did not spend some time in his workshop. To Durer, who visited the city in 1506, Bellini, although "very old," was "still best in painting." Even the appearance of Giorgione and Titian, both of whom had been Bellini's pupils, did not dim his reputation, and some of his most original masterpieces, including the Feast of the Gods in The National Gallery, Washington and the haunting Drunkenness of Noah in the Musee des Beaux- Arts, Besancon, were painted during the last years of his life. How old he was when he died in 1516 is a matter of speculation, for we do not know the date of his birth: some have argued that it was as early as 1429, others that it was as late as 1440. (I favor a date more or less midway between these two extremes and believe that Bellini's earliest works date from the late 1450s.) Nor, for that matter, do we know when he married Ginevra Bocheta, or when his son Alvise was born. A remarkable twist to this seemingly uneventful private life is provided by a humanist poem, written around 1506, that describes the aged Bellini--by that time both a widower and childless--in bed with a young boy as handsome as a Greek statue. Should this surprising window into his bedchamber alter the way we respond to the beautiful nude male figure of Saint Sebastian in Bellini's landmark altarpiece painted for the church of San Giobbe (now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice)? Probably not, for Bellini was too great an artist to allow personal erotic desire to interfere with the devotional affect of his paintings. Instead we are bound to admire the way Bellini has contrived a figure that is at once serenely beautiful and yet completely naturalistic--a work that combined those qualities that Winckelmann admired in Greek statues and famously described as "noble simplicity and calm grandeur" without recourse to the exquisitely antiquarian style of the greatest sculptor then coming of age in Venice, Tullio Lombardo, whose marvelous statue of Adam in the Metropolitan Museum--tragically damaged in an accident in 2002--provides the most pertinent counterpoint to Bellini's achievement. (I have long believed that Bellini's collaboration with Tullio's father Pietro, who designed some of the frames of Bellini's altarpieces, was crucial to the painter's conception of architectural space; his sculptural reliefs also served as models for Bellini's depictions of the dead Christ supported by youthful angels against a black background.) Although, like Mantegna, Bellini knew a number of prominent poets and humanists who penned praises of his work, he did not share his brother-in-law's antiquarian interests or espouse his rigorously intellectual approach to painting. His monochromatic depiction of the Continence of Scipio (now at the National Gallery in Washington) was intended to simulate a long marble relief, but the conceit falls flat and the work cannot be compared to Mantegna's brilliant companion canvas showing the introduction of the cult of Cybele in Rome (at the National Gallery in London), in which the limitations of relief sculpture are rigorously observed. At the same time, Bellini's paintings are the product of meticulous calculation. He perfected his knowledge of perspective under the tutelage of a certain Girolamo Malatini, but as Daniele Barbaro remarked in his sixteenth-century treatise, this mastery was employed not for show, but to enhance the impression of verisimilitude for the viewer. First and foremost, Bellini is an artist of space, light, and atmosphere. It is this that makes him the crucial figure in the transformation of Renaissance painting in Venice. His capacity continually to expand the basis of his art is without parallel in the fifteenth century, and it has few later analogies (one thinks of Matisse, whose late works--like those of Bellini--seem to spring from a renewed and deepened engagement with life). From quite early in his career, he experimented with the possibilities offered by oil painting, which he combined with the more traditional tempera technique. He managed thereby to extend the range and the richness of his colors. There are analogies with Netherlandish practice, but Bellini seems to have developed his technique largely on his own, and the old idea that he learned oil painting from Antonello da Messina, who was in Venice in 1475-1476, has now largely been discounted by technical examination. By the time Bellini painted the San Giobbe Altarpiece, around 1480, he was able to achieve a variety of effects that would have been impossible employing the meticulous technique of egg tempera. First and foremost, oil enabled him to paint broadly on a large surface without loss of detail. Textural variety was also increased by the use of impasto. And the modeling becomes fused and the contours of his figures soften. The architectural setting of the Virgin and her court--a fictive chapel whose details match those of the monumental marble frame designed by Pietro Lombardo, and still in the church--is suffused with a soft light that plays gently over the figures and picks out the shimmer of the gold mosaic apse, creating a serene harmony peculiarly conducive to meditation. No simple devotional style of painting, this. It is, rather, an innovative and carefully considered deployment of perspective and optics to create an effect of physical presence: "a richness of sanctity that is almost profane." One need only compare Bellini's altarpiece with the work of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi in Florence, or with that of Mantegna in Mantua or Piero della Francesca in Urbino, to appreciate the scope of his achievement. Bellini freed himself from the twin shadows of Mantegna and Netherlandish painting that fell so strongly across his early work, and created the basis for the art of Giorgione and Titian and, by extension, of Western painting down to Impressionism. Yet neither Giorgione nor Titian--nor any other Italian artist, though Correggio and Federico Barocci came closest--ever equaled Bellini's ability to suggest the miraculous in the everyday, and the divine harmony that he seems to have believed pervades all creation. Here, indeed, is painting that reveals "facts transfigured through love." Keith Christiansen is Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By Keith Christiansen