Original subtitles

Good afternoon. Today I want to share the art of Giovanni Bellini with you, at least the early

art of Giovanni Bellini. We looked at his brother Gentile's work at the end of the last lecture,

and Gentile Bellini and his brother both seem to have been kept quite busy in their father's studio

for a great many years. I haven't said much about their father, and I'm not going to begin to now,

but of course he was their teacher, and he was well known, and he had a very active and very extensive

workshop with many projects, and since both of the sons seem to have been engaged in that shop and

kept quite busy, it wasn't surprising that they didn't really begin their own independent careers

until they were well into their 20s. Giovanni Bellini was born about 1430 and died in 1516.

By the time of his death, he was the dean of Venetian painters. Extended families of artists seem to be

a particularly Venetian phenomenon, and both of the Bellini brothers are examples of this, of sons who

kept working in the family business. Jacopo, the father, died around 1470 or 71, and in the years just

before that, the two sons began to assert themselves as independent masters. When Giovanni Bellini did emerge

as an independent painter in the 1460s, and thereafter throughout his career, he was known for

solemn pictures of the Madonna and child, and for very moving images of the Pietà. Although he would

eventually produce superb multi-figure altarpieces and mythologies, these two types that I just mentioned

are inextricably linked with his art and are particularly dominant in the early years of his career.

You are looking at a Madonna with the Blessing Christ Child, painted in the 1460s. It's not a dated work,

but sometime during that first decade of his independent activity, it shows a mournful Madonna

protectively clasping the child with both hands. She is upright, her head just slightly tilted away, but

basically a very vertical figure and a broad figure filling the vertical panel. The child, which she

supports, stands on the balustrade in front of her, leans to our left, and although he is blessing,

his hand is in the act of blessing, he does not look at us. He doesn't look at the worshipper who

receives this benediction. Rather, his eyes are focused away from the painting, focused on the unseen,

focused on, as so often happens in these images of the Madonna and child, focused on the future, focused

on the passion, which is implicit in this painting in the black background. We've seen that in one other

occasion, at least the black background suggesting the passion, the death and sacrifice of Christ, but this is

always a constant in images of the Madonna and child. The half-length composition that he uses here, placed behind a

sill or a balustrade of some sort, is a composition in Jacopo Bellini's Madonnas, the father's Madonnas, that is used

continuously by his son, Giovanni. The angle of the child is disturbing slightly to me. It's not a natural

pose. The lower part of the body leans to the left, our left, and is supported perhaps on the shoulder of

the Madonna, whose hands very protectively clasp the body. The upper half of the body of the child is upright,

and then the head turns again at that angle to the left. There is an intentional breaking of the body,

an intentional angularity and unnaturalness to the pose, which is disturbing. And the wrapping,

which is rather toga-like, in a sense, it's also suggestive of a shroud. And again,

the painting is deeply mournful. These paintings can, these paintings of the Madonna and Child by

Giovanni Bellini can absorb your eyes and your mind for a very long time. I'm going to contrast it with a

much later Madonna, perhaps 20 years later, a Madonna now in the Academia Gallery in Venice,

a Madonna of the Trees, as it is known, painted in 1487. It's actually his first dated work,

and it is a very different painting, different in color. We suddenly go from that dark black background

and dark colors for the Madonna and Child to a scene which is set out of doors in front of a cloth of honor,

flanked by trees that give it its name, the two trees, and with bright daylight colors, if you will.

That cloth of honor, which one often sees behind the Madonna, it is an old invention found in medieval

art as well as Renaissance and later, and it is the kind of cloth that you would find behind royalty in

here used for the Queen of Heaven, if you will, for the Madonna. This composition, with an outdoor

Madonna and Child, behind a sill again, marble in this case, with a cloth of honor, but with a landscape

opening on either side, may be Giovanni's invention. I don't know anyone who did it before then,

there may be somebody, but it may be his invention. In any case, it's a very lyrical motif in his hands.

Whether the two trees have symbolic allusion is not clear. I think they probably do. You can,

I mean, the tree is such a standard symbol in various ways in religious scenes, in scenes of the

crucifixion, in scenes having to do with the Garden of Eden, in all sorts of ways, the trees can be

symbolic. It's been suggested, without any specific point, that it alludes to something in the Song of

Songs, or the Song of Solomon, but I was unable to find a passage which seemed to match it. But certainly,

whether they're symbolic or not, they're freshly expressive and compositionally exact. He doesn't

have much space on either side of that cloth, just a narrow strip on both sides. And yet,

the eye goes back, pulled back by those trees to them, even while they emphasize the verticality

of the whole composition. And beyond them, you suddenly see the mountains, just the edges of the mountains

of the horizon line here. A field in the near ground, and of course, we pass that very quickly, and suddenly

you are aware of the mountain range on the terra firma, the mainland near Venice, again.

The whole composition is upright. She is a strong vertical. The cloth of honor is, including a seam,

as it were, in the center of it, emphasizes that. And the child is, in this case, very erect,

very upright. Again, the wonderful supporting hands. Hands in Giovanni Bellini are not only expressive,

but they are so extraordinarily beautiful. Look at them as they hold the child. Look at the design,

if I may put it that way, of the fingers. The angularity, the spacing, the rhythm that sets up,

the way one hand nestles against the other, the way the Christ child's hand holds his mother's fingers.

It's childlike, and yet, of course, very dignified. Even the up-curved thumb of the Madonna,

leading us back to the head of the Christ child as a compositional as well as a human purpose here.

Human is the word, in a way, for this, because it's quite different from the first one I showed you,

in that we have here a new and very human majesty in his treatment of the subject. It is, by the way,

painted in oil, the medium that he learned, as we will see, from Antonello da Messina in 1475-76,

when that artist came to Venice. So we've moved from tempera, medium that he used in all paintings

before 1475-76, and oil to oil, which he used either alone or in combination thereafter. He also painted,

Giovanni Bellini also painted very moving images of the Pietà, or the Lamentation, in a specifically

northern half-length format. Despite repetition, that is, he did them many times, his interpretation

of these subjects and the type, the way he presents it, rarely fails to touch us. This Pietà, done probably

between 1465 and 1470, as in London today in the National Gallery. It's a strongly vertical composition,

like the Madonna and Child that we were looking at. And in it, the dead Christ is supported by angels,

again, and perhaps the dead Christ is on the lid of a sarcophagus. You see how his hand, the knuckles of

his hand, bend as they come in contact with this surface. It may be interpreted, possibly, in that fashion.

This owes a notable, noticeable debt to Donatello's bronze relief of the dead Christ on the high

altar in the Santo and Padua. You will remember there are great many images on the high altar there,

including two images of the dead Christ, one in bronze and one in marble. And this one, I think,

is quite close to this Donatello, which is on the end of that altar, the dead Christ in bronze, supported

by two angels who are wonderfully weeping here. Their hands pressed, their free hands, because the

other hand pulls back the cloth behind, behind the body, their free hand clasped against their face and

their mouths open in wailing, the little wings overlapping the frame. This is very, very moving,

very beautiful, essentially symmetrical when you see it, or so you think it is essentially symmetrical.

But then slightly pulled to one side, the angels too slightly differing in pose, the cloth behind them just

slightly differing, a pull just a bit away from that intense verticality.

The Pietà, which is in Ibrera Gallery in Milan today, that you're looking at now, painted about 1465,

is perhaps the masterpiece of the early career of Giovanni Bellini. His Pietà is so poignant,

so moving, so intense, that it's hard to look away from it, hard to look at and hard to look away. The theme

the theme of the half-length Pietà, in which the dead body of Christ is displayed to us by the Madonna

and Saint John the Evangelist, held for our contemplation, has a frightful quality, a frightful immediacy.

It's his invention again. It's his invention. In the crucifixion, Mary and John flank the cross.

Now the crucifixion is passed, and they flank him while holding the body, by the way, in the sarcophagus,

because all three figures are standing in the sarcophagus. Look past the front ledge, and you

see the back edge here on the left hand and on the right hand side. This sill in front, the edge of

the sarcophagus, can still be read ambiguously, and is intended to be. It can be read simultaneously as the

edge of the sarcophagus, and as the front of an altar, making the body of Christ a literal image

of the Eucharist. And look at their hands again. He never surpassed this, I think. The four hands,

and the way that they're choreographed, and the different expressions that they have. The two dead

hands of Christ, both with the wounds, but not strongly emphatic on blood, just the wounds in the hand,

his lifeless hand supported, held by his mother's firm, strong hand. The lower hand resting, as we saw it

in the other Pietà, on the sarcophagus edge, and next to it, the hand of the evangelist, as it comes in from

the side, widely spread fingers, a very different kind of expression. The whole area, just let your eye

traverse the whole area of hands. It is, in a sense, the core of the painting. At John, well, the contrast

here is extraordinary, because the mother and child, the mother and son, the heads are pressed together,

and one has to notice the contrast in flesh tones here, as well, between the pallor of Jesus, and the

face of the Madonna, and the face of the evangelist. She presses her face as closely as she can to his. He

still wears the crown of thorns, by the way, which gives the painting an extra, an extra edge.

And in contrast to that, we're given a gap on this side, a hiatus, and then the head of the evangelist, who

turns away, and whose expression is overt, and emotional, and outward, his mouth open as he

expresses his emotion away from the tight group of these two heads. The striated clouds behind the figures,

reiterating the horizontal of the sarcophagus below, and also of the heads above. The landscape hardly

enters into it. It's barren. It is in the deep background. It is Golgotha, I think, back here with

the crosses, but one can hardly penetrate into it. You're kept in the front with these figures in the

foreground. It's not hysterical, and I say that with a certain wonder, because a painting like this could

be hysterical. The emotion could be out of control, but he exerts immense emotional control, and the

painting has a kind of silent grandeur. The Madonna and Christ, the contrast of them with Saint John,

the contrast of the flesh tones, the moving striated sky, everything here gives us one single powerful

emotion. I'm going to digress for just a moment to say that I frequently hear, when teaching religious

subjects from people who haven't encountered them frequently, a certain level of discomfort

in facing scenes of suffering, whether Christ or the martyrs, and they're there all the way from

medieval art through the 17th century, you are faced with suffering, with dying, and with death,

and with cruelty. And it is, and yet people seem discomforted by it. They'll say, well, why did they

choose to paint that? Well, we've been doing these lectures long enough to know why religious art was

dominant, and how what this would have meant in terms of the faith, and so forth. That we

understand. But you see, this goes deeper, because we don't question seeing death and dying on the TV

news, or on the shows that are based on the TV news. We don't see it directly, either. We always see

illusions to it. We see people being carried off. We see the car crushed. We see various things. So we

don't experience that even directly. It's second hand. This, because of the intensity of this, second

hand though it is, when looking at the Pietà, it is very hard not to turn your head away, unless you're

already so riveted to the painting. I think that it is simply that we, in this society, in this country, don't

experience death and dying directly very often. Even in our own families. People die in hospitals, and so forth. And we don't have that

direct connection with the fact of dying and the fact of death that centuries did have, and that people in

most parts of the world today still have. And I think it's important to keep that in our minds when looking at

these images which are unquestionably powerful and painful. Giovanni Bellini was Andrea Mantegna's

brother-in-law. I don't think I mentioned that earlier when we talked about Mantegna. Giovanni's

sister Nicolossia was married to Andrea Mantegna in 1453. Padua and Venice could hardly be closer,

and the two artists were therefore naturally in regular contact. Bellini's Agony in the Garden

of 1465-70, probably, in London in the National Gallery, is clearly similar to the Mantegna version of

the same subject which we looked at quite recently. It was Mantegna who first stated the subject. Bellini,

in a sense, follows his compositional ideas, but stylistically and expressively is completely

diverse. As a result, especially since these two are in the same museum today, in London in the

National Gallery, they've become a famous art historical comparison. So let me look at the

Giovanni first, and then in Giovanni Bellini's Agony in the Garden, it's been a long night of prayer

and internal conflict because dawn is breaking. This is quite extraordinary. This is one of the

loveliest, one of the earliest dawns in painting. Look at the color of the horizon. It is extraordinarily

poetic, and it simply isn't found prior to this. There's a single angel in the sky rather than the

group which approach, which approach in Mantegna's painting, a single angel almost invisible in its

translucency who holds a chalice in his hand as Christ directs his prayer upward. The weight of sleep

on the apostles who have experienced, remember, the shock and the tension of the Last Supper just a

little while ago, and they really have had enough for the day, and they have simply, their sleep is so

convincing. They are so remarkably taken by sleep. They don't, of course, even see, therefore, Judas

leading the soldiers here in the middle ground to capture Christ. The scene is flanked by two

hill towns, not, as in Mantegna, by Jerusalem on one side, but simply Italian hill towns.

Here's the Mantegna that we looked at before, and it is quite wonderful to

to look at. The implacable harshness of the landscape, of the rockiness in Mantegna's version,

in his sculptured scene, is replaced by a tender vulnerability in the Bellini. Let me show them to

you together. The Bellini on the left, of course, the Mantegna on the right. You see what a wonderful

contrast, and yet they are clearly related. Bellini clearly was looking at Mantegna and consciously

creating a poetic alternative to the epic narrative of his brother-in-law's painting.

The figures, Bellini's, are smaller. The sense of spiritual isolation is therefore enhanced,

and the end of the long night of prayer, as I said, is announced by this lovely, lovely dawn,

which ironically reveals the imminent capture. The line, the biblical text is, the hour is come.

Bellini's lyricism and his emotional resonance are what we find in that image,

contrasting with the intellectual passion of Mantegna. The entombment, this monumental entombment,

probably painted about 1475, the date is much discussed, now in Rome, in the Vatican Museum there.

This painting is also a testament to the reciprocal relationship of the brothers-in-law, for Mantegna's

stoic remoteness is felt here in Bellini's painting, despite the physical immediacy of Bellini's group.

And it is immediate. They're pushed right toward us, cropped on three sides so that the group is right

up toward us. But you must take the viewpoint into account, and you see a low viewpoint has been

painted into it. The original position of this painting was the crowning element of a large

altarpiece called the Pesaro altarpiece for the city where the church was, and it was later separated

from that altarpiece. And we saw something actually quite similar to this in an earlier lecture when we

looked at the top of the Pisa altarpiece by Masaccio and saw the crucifixion, and knew that it should have

been seen from below instead of straight on as you do in the museum today. This powerful close-up

treatment of the entombment was probably painted just before the arrival in Venice of Antonello

da Messina, a painter from the south of Italy for a two-year sojourn which profoundly affected the

artistic development of Giovanni Bellini and of Venetian painting as a whole. Antonello da Messina,

born about 1430 and died in 1479, was destined to alter the course of Venetian painting. I'll hold

his biography for the next lecture, but I wanted to conclude this lecture with a look at one of the

paintings he made probably in Venice, but certainly had with him in Venice. It is the Saint Jerome in his

study of about 1475. London National Gallery today. It's painted in oil as he did throughout his career

on panel. It's very small, much smaller than you might think at least. It's 18, approximately 18 by 14

inches, so it's a small work. And it exhibits one of the notable features of his art, his knowledge of

Flemish painting. In the spatial organization in which we have a fictive stone arch, this has to be

understood as architecture, a full-sized arch, opening onto the Saint's study and then views through windows

at the rear of the Saint's study. The descriptive detail in everything within and on the edge of this,

that is on the front edge, the descriptive detail, the numerous symbolic objects, the use of the oil

medium, all of these things relate to Flemish painting. And in fact, in the early 16th century,

this painting was thought to be Flemish. Seeing the painting in the house of Antonio Pascalino in 1529,

a writer who was going about looking at artworks, recorded,

the little picture representing Saint Jerome reading in his study, robed as a cardinal, is ascribed by some

to Antonello da Messina. But the great majority, with more probability, ascribe it to Jan van Eyck,

or to Memling, old Flemish painters. And it really shows their manner. Though the face may be finished

in the Italian style. The buildings are in the Flemish style. The little landscape is natural and highly

finished. It is only to be seen through a window and the door of the study. And it's well in perspective.

All the work, as regards its finish, coloring, drawing, strength, and relief, is perfect.

It's a nice bit of criticism. A peacock, a quail, and a barber's basin are represented in it. They're

all in the foreground sill. On the desk is a little label, which seems to contain the name of the master.

But by looking at it closely, one cannot distinguish any letters as it is all a deception. That's the

end of the rather long quote. But you can see that he really looked and gave a very long look at this

work, and also had to try to consider who had painted it, and the name Jan van Eyck was raised.

Now, it's sometimes been assumed that Antonello had visited Flanders, and we'll discuss this further in

the next lecture on him. Further observations that I want to make, however, while we have this image,

have to do, one, with its small size, two, with the extraordinary light. It falls from the left. You

can get the first great sense of it on the foreground sill, where the peacock and the bird to the left,

partridge, I think, rather than quail, is here. Perhaps they're the same. And you can see the shadow

of the birds as well. The light enters the large space, the large church-like space, in which this

strange little action office area has been set up for the saint to do his reading and writing in his

study here, the steps that go up to it. The succession of architectural spaces, one after the other,

are superb, wonderfully handled, and, as the man said, the perspective is perfect. The lion, which you

expect to find with the saint, is wandering back here. He's in the mid-distance in the shadow. Usually,

he's curled up at his feet. The composition, the echoing curves, for instance, and arches,

the arches are obvious here on the right as well, and on the left as well, and the arch of the doorway in

the front. But they're the smaller curves, just as important. The curves down here, underneath the

pedestal that has the staircase, the curve of the desk here as well. All of these curves lead to the

larger curves within the painting, and, of course, they're played against the rectilinear elements

of the study itself and of the doorway. It's a very, very strong and complex and yet utterly clear

of composition, and one in which detail is so precise. There was no one else in Italy who could

paint this kind of detail. No wonder they thought it was Flemish. Nobody who could do this kind of small,

descriptive detail in a panel 18 inches high. Surely this was a sort of showpiece, an announcement of

his abilities when Antonello arrived in Venice in 1475. He may have done it there, but some historians think

that it was an earlier painting that he brought it with him as a demonstration of his talent. We'll find out about

why he was, why he arrived there, but he still had to have something to show his abilities. And by the way,

one reason for thinking it may have been done earlier is that the pavement, which is Majolica here,

is something much more common in the south of Italy than in the north. And obviously, however, the painting

was in Venice in 1529 because that's when it was described by the the so-called Inonimo who who wrote

that book about paintings in northern in Venice in that area. Antonello spent about two years in Venice.

He and Giovanni Bellini were probably exact contemporaries, and in the next lecture we will see the liberating

influence of Antonello's art upon that of Giovanni Bellini. Thank you for your attention.