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”28—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:
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.29
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.30 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.31
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 V
enetian 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 Pietà in the Brera at Milan has been warmly praised,32 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
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.