Giovanni Bellini

About Giovanni Bellini

Who is it?: Renaissance Painter
Birth Year: 1430
Birth Place: Venice, Italian
Known for: Painting
Movement: Renaissance

Giovanni Bellini

Giovanni Bellini was born on 1430 in Venice, Italian, is Renaissance Painter. Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter whose long and successful career saw him starting with Quattrocento styles and eventually progressing towards more advanced post-Giorgione styles. He was a scion of a famous Venetian artistic family, the Bellini’s and was considerably the most successful and famed painters among them. The Venetian artistic milieu included his father Jacopo Bellini who remained one of the prominent artists since the beginning of the Renaissance. Others are his brother Gentile and Andrea Mantegna, who came under the tutelage of Jacob Bellini and later became Giovanni’s brother-in-law. Giovanni’s knowledge of outdoor light that reflected in his vibrant and sensuous oil paintings with detailed shades was path-breaking in such a way that a viewer can imagine the season as well as the time of the day from his creations. The first two decades of his career witnessed his penchant towards conventional religious subjects such as ‘St. Jerome in the Desert’, ‘Crucifixions’, ‘The Blood of the Redeemer’ and ‘Pietàs’. He was open to new techniques and experiments that saw him emerge as a leading landscape painter. His professional as well as personal life was marked with fame, success and tranquillity. He was an enthusiast who always yearned to hone his skills and learn new styles and themes from new artists including his pupils like Titian and Giorgione. Even though some of his significant works were lost with time or destroyed by fire, some of his revered pieces like the ‘Feast of the Gods’ and ‘San Giobbe Altarpiece’ still exists.
Giovanni Bellini is a member of Renaissance Painters

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Biography/Timeline

1505

In 1505 she endeavoured through Cardinal Bembo to obtain from him another picture, this time of a secular or mythological character. What the subject of this piece was, or whether it was actually delivered, we do not know.

1506

Albrecht Dürer, visiting Venice for a second time in 1506, describes Giovanni Bellini as still the best Painter in the city, and as full of all courtesy and generosity towards foreign brethren of the brush.

1507

In 1507 Bellini's brother Gentile died, and Giovanni completed the picture of the Preaching of St. Mark which he had left unfinished; a task on the fulfillment of which the bequest by the elder brother to the younger of their father's sketch-book had been made conditional.

1513

In 1513 Giovanni's position as sole master (since the death of his brother and of Alvise Vivarini) in charge of the paintings in the Hall of the Great Council was threatened by one of his former pupils. Young Titian desired a share of the same undertaking, to be paid for on the same terms. Titian's application was granted, then after a year rescinded, and then after another year or two granted again; and the aged master must no doubt have undergone some annoyance from his sometime pupil's proceedings. In 1514 Giovanni undertook to paint The Feast of the Gods for the duke Alfonso I of Ferrara, but died in 1516.

1577

Of Giovanni's activity in the interval between the altar-pieces of San Giobbe and San Zaccaria, there are a few minor works left, though the great mass of his output perished with the fire of the Doge's Palace in 1577. The last ten or twelve years of the master's life saw him besieged with more commissions than he could well complete. Already in the years 1501–1504 the marchioness Isabella Gonzaga of Mantua had had great difficulty in obtaining delivery from him of a picture of the Madonna and Saints (now lost) for which part payment had been made in advance.

1867

As is the case with a number of his brother, Gentile's public works of the period, many of Giovanni's great public works are now lost. The still more famous altar-piece painted in tempera for a chapel in the church of S. Giovanni e Paolo, where it perished along with Titian's Peter Martyr and Tintoretto's Crucifixion in the disastrous fire of 1867.

2015

An interval of some years, no doubt chiefly occupied with work in the Hall of the Great Council, seems to separate the San Giobbe Altarpiece, and that of the church of San Zaccaria at Venice. Formally, the works are very similar, so a comparison between serves to illustrate the shift in Bellini's work over the last decade of the 15th century. Both pictures are of the Holy Conversation (sacred conversation between the Madonna and Saints) type. Both show the Madonna seated on a throne (thought to allude to the throne of Solomon), between classicizing columns. Both place the holy figures beneath a golden mosaicked half dome that recalls the Byzantine architecture in the basilica of St. Mark.

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