Giovanni Bellini
by Oskar Batschmann
from Reaktion Books
The artist struggled to break out of the long shadow cast by his accomplished father Jacopo and father-in-law Andrea Mantegna, and Bätschmann chronicles Bellini’s development of distinct aesthetic and painting techniques that enabled him to set himself apart. Bellini also insisted on choosing his own subjects and themes, independent of the preferences of his patron Isabella d’Este, and thus set new standards for the role of the artist.
Anchoring the analysis are a wealth of vibrant color reproductions that include such famous works as The Feast of the Gods and Madonna and Child, as well as photographs of Bellini’s lauded altar-pieces at the churches of San Giobbe, Murano, and San Zaccania. Drawing on these masterpieces, Bätschmann argues that Bellini’s artistry and skillful blending of colors created a new aesthetic more akin to music than to previous approaches to painting. And by leading viewers to understand this subtle, refined sensibility, Bellini transformed them into knowledgeable admirers of art.
A lushly illustrated and expansive study, Giovanni Bellini is essential for all historians and admirers of Renaissance art.
The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini (Cambridge Companions to the History of Art)
from Cambridge University Press
This Companion brings together commissioned essays focusing on important topics and themes of the career of Giovanni Bellini, the dominant painter of Early Renaissance Venice. The contributions consider Bellini's position in the social and professional life of early modern Venice, and reassess his artistic relationships with his brother-in-law Mantegna, Flemish painting, and the "modern style" that emerged in Italy around 1500. They also explore his original approaches to sculpture and architecture, and landscape and color.
Giovanni Bellini was the dominate painter of Early Renaissance Venice. This volume brings together commissioned essays that focus on important topics and themes in Bellini's career. They include a consideration of Bellini's position in the social and professional life of early modern Venice; reassessments of his artistic relationships with his brother-in-law Mantegna, with Flemish painting, and with the "modern style" that emerged in Italy around 1500; and explorations of Bellini's approaches to sculpture and architecture, and to landscape and color, elements that have always been recognized as central to his pictorial genius.
Giovanni Bellini and the Art of Devotion
by Keith Christiansen
from Indianapolis Museum of Art
Giovanni Bellini was the leading artist of the early Renaissance in Venice and the master of what was probably the largest workshop of any painter in Italy. Many of the works that are today associated with Bellini are half-length images of the Virgin and Child, a type of painting that became the mainstay of his workshopÂ’s production, where they were created and replicated in great numbers to meet the needs of private devotion. The local market was large and its demands were varied in terms of both style and quality, and the Bellini workshop accommodated these demands through standardized methods of production.
The essays included in this book examine the practice of workshop replication both to understand the specific working methods of BelliniÂ’s shop and to situate artistic practice within the broader context of the demand for particular kinds of images.
Venetian Painting in the Fifteenth Century: Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna (Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History)
Otto Pacht, one of the most significant art-historians of the 'Vienna School', and well known for his analyses of Early Netherlandish art, turns his attention in this publication to the humanist circle of Early Renaissance painters in Venice, dominated by Jacopo Bellini, his sons Gentile and Giovanni, and also his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna. It was a period of newly awakened interest in the Antique, of studies made directly from nature, and of trial and error in the technique of perspective. And in addition, a new awareness of the role of light and colour in the devotional and often monumental images of the Madonna, of altarpieces and of allegories contributed to the founding of what we now recognise as the hall-mark of Venetian painting, that culminated with Titian. Of the Bellini family, it has been Giovanni who was generally regarded as the major figure of the dynasty. Pacht, however, devotes particular attention to Jacopo's work, interpreting it as the basis for his sons' later development. He analyses Jacopo's London and Paris Sketchbook drawings, demonstrating where Late Gothic elements can be seen to be overtaken by the need to give perspective depth to the image, and how subsequent painting took account of these changes. This is also the essence of Pacht's examination of Mantegna's work, where the construction of space and depth is the key to our understanding of Mantegna's creative process. Turning to the next generation of the Bellini family, Pachts guides our eyes to appreciate the refinement and perception of Gentile's portraits, and finally takes us step by step through the works of Giovanni, where fantasy combines with the play of colour and light in creating compositions, devotional images, and landscape settings of perfect harmony and beauty.
Man of sorrows of Giovanni Bellini: Sources and significance
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