Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/563

Rh perished. In the cathedral of Verona there was, until it was destroyed by the barbarism of the 18th century, an important Crucifixion from his hand. In the archbishop s palace of the same city another Crucifixion still remains, but greatly injured. At Padua Jacopo appears to have lived several years, and to have founded there a school which became the rival of the school of Squarcione. There his sons, Gentile and Giovanni, grew up ; there his daughter Niccolosia found a husband in Andrea Mantegna, the most famous of the scholars of Squarcione. (See .) In Jacopo Bellini the Venetian school had not yet found its special and characteristic manner. But he holds a position of great importance, as having been the first to fertilize Venetian soil with the science and genius of Florence. From no extant pictures of his can his manner bo judged so well as from the book of his sketches, which has become the property of the British Museum. This, in spite of fading and decay, is a unique and invaluable possession, containing a vast number of original studies tinted or drawn with pen or ink, and including composi tions from Scripture and the lives of the saints, from classical fable, and from natural history in surprising variety.

2. was the elder of the two sons of Jacopo. To the precise date of his birth we have no clue. Both he and his brother Giovanni served together under their father Jacopo as his pupils as long as he lived. After his death each of them practised his art indepen dently in their native city; but a warm and unbroken affection is recorded to have always subsisted between the brothers. In 1464 Gentile was commissioned to paint the doors of the great organ in St Mark s with figures of the four saints Mark, Jerome, Theodore, and Francis. The next year he painted for the church of Sta Maria dell Orto a picture of the apotheosis of Lorenzo Giustiniani, patriarch of Venice. From 1465 until 1474 we -cannot trace his occupations with precision, though there are several extant works that can be assigned to the interval. On the 21st of September 1474, he was appointed to restore and renew the existing painted decorations in the hall of the Great Council in the Ducal Palace. These were in part frescoes, the work of his father s master, Gentile da Fabriano. Some of them Gentile Bellini restored, and some were so ruined that he had to destroy them and put in their place new work of his own. The practice of painting in oil upon canvas had lately been brought to Venice by Antonello of Messina, The new medium, besides yielding richer effects, resisted damp and salt better than the old ; and all the painters of Venice were eagerly learning its use. Gentile adopted it in the hall of the Great Council. In 1479 the Sultan Mahomet sent word to the Signoria of Venice that he desired the services at Constantinople of a good painter of their state, at the same time inviting the doge to the wedding of his son. The doge declined to go, but the Signoria chose Gentile Bellini to be sent with two assistants at the expense of the state and to paint for the Turk, first electing his younger brother Giovanni to fill his place in the works at the Ducal Palace until he should return. He was admir ably received, and painted the portraits of the sultan and many of his officers, besides that picture of the reception of a Venetian embassy by the grand vizier which is now at the Louvre (No. 68). It is a well-known and doubtful story how the sultan alleged that a picture of Gentile s showed an imperfect knowledge of the appearance of the muscles of the neck after decapitation, and to convince the painter had a slave decapitated in his presence, and how this made Gentile uncomfortable and anxious to get away. He returned at the end of 1480, bringing gifts and honours ; and from that time he and Giovanni were engaged together for the state on the decoration of the great hall- Gentile painted there four great subjects from the story of Barbarossa, which unhappily perished in the fire of 1577. It is recorded that in 1486 the young Titian entered his workshop as a pupil. Three of the most important of his works date from the last five or six years of the century, and were done for the school of St John the Evangelist at Venice. They represent the cure of a sick Venetian by a relic of the cross, the procession in honour of the same relic in the piazza of St Mark, and the miracle of the recovery of the relic from the Grand Canal (Academy of Venice, Nos. 543, 555, 529). In 1506 Gentile was so busy as to write that he could not accept a commission proposed by Francesco, marquis of Mantua. The next winter he fell sick, and made his will, bequeathing his father s sketch-book above described to his brother John, on condition that the brother should finish the picture of the Sermon of St Mark which the sick man had then on hand. He died on the 23d of February 1507. It is by his science and spirit in the treatment of animated and dignified processional groups, with many figures and architecture of masterly perspective, that we chiefly know Gentile Bellini. He is a workman of infinite precision, and a fine colourist, though his manner has some of the hardness of the earlier times. To conduct the school of Venice to its final liberty and splendour was the work of his younger brother, the great

3.. His birth it is no less impossible to fix with accuracy than that of his brother. His earliest work, done at Padua, shows strongly the stern influence of his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna. The National Gallery has a Christ on the Mount, painted by Giovanni, probably about 1455, and apparently in direct competition with a picture of the same subject by Mantegna himself, similarly conceived, which belongs to the Baring Gallery. The characteristics of the style formed at Padua by Man tegna and Giovanni Bellini, and maintained by the former all his life, are a great intensity and vehemence of expres sion, an iron severity and unmatched firmness and strength of draughtsmanship; a tendency, in draperies, to imitate the qualities of sculpture ; a love of the difficulties of perspec tive ; a leaning towards the antique, which these masters learned to transform and reanimate with a more passionate energy and an austerer strength of their own. Of the two, Bellini is always the more reserved and simple, the more inclined to work from nature and the less from the antique, and he has the richer choice in colour; but there are works in which they are indistinguishable. The period when Bellini painted in this first manner and in tempera may be roughly fixed (though there is often great uncertainy as to the dates of his pieces, and though at all times he seems occasionally to have recurred to his early practice) between 1455 and 1472. It is probable that the famous picture of the Cir cumcision now at Castle Howard, which was repeated more than once by the master himself, and many times over by his pupils and assistants, was painted before this date. The altar pieces on a great scale, which are the noblest monument of his middle period, were certainly painted after it. Of these the chief were the Virgin and Saints, in a chapel of the church of Saints Giovanni and Paolo at Venice, which perished along with Titian s Peter Martyr in the fatal fire of 1867; a great Coronation of the Virgin, in the church of St Dominic at Pesaro; a Transfiguration, now in the museum of Naples ; a Virgin and Saints, painted for the church of S. Giobbe, now in the Academy at Venice (No. 36). These, and the multitude of Madonnas and other devotional pictures painted by Giovanni Bellini during the thirty years following his change of manner and adoption of the oil medium, are among the noblest products of the re ligious art of the world. They stand alone in their union of 