Giovanni, or Gian Bellini as he is generally called, the subject of this brief record and appreciation, is one of the most fascinating painters of the fifteenth century. He has left many a lovely picture to the world, but alas he was no diarist, he had no Boswell, and there are gaps in the history of his life that will never be filled up. In the vast and unexplored region of Italian archives there may be some facts that research will bring to light, but at present we know very little, and can only be grateful that the story of his life is not shrouded altogether in the mist that obscures so much of the personal history of eminent Venetians in the fifteenth century.

“When zealous efforts are supported by talent and rectitude, though the beginning may appear lowly and poor, yet do they proceed constantly upwards by gradual steps, never ceasing nor taking rest until they have finally attained to the summit of distinction.” In this fashion Giorgio Vasari, who in those admirable but unreliable “Lives,” seldom fails to speak kindly and enthusiastically of artists whom neither he nor his friends had occasion to dislike, begins his account of the house of Bellini. He passes on to deal in detail with Jacopo Bellini, the father of that Giovanni with whose life and work it is proposed to deal briefly in this place. Of the father little is known, but he is said to have lived in the shadow of St. Mark’s great Cathedral in Venice, and to have worked under some of the Umbrian masters in the Ducal Palace. He must have served and studied in the studio of Gentile da Fabriano in days when Fra Angelico had not reached the Convent of San Marco; there is evidence, too, that he travelled and painted portraits. The date of his death is as uncertain as the year of his birth. It is said that the new paganism held more attractions for him than the old faith, and that the most of his commissions were from the great and flourishing secular institutions of the Republic. Little is left of his pictures, but a few delightful sketches are preserved in Paris and London and, but for the larger fame of his sons, Jacopo Bellini would doubtless have been forgotten to-day, and such work as is left would be attributed by leading critics to different masters.

Gentile Bellini seems to have been born between 1425 and 1430 and the date of Giovanni’s birth is not known definitely. It may be associated with the year 1430.

At this time it must be remembered that Venice was on the road to her ultimate decline. Costly wars with Milan and Florence had seriously damaged the Exchequer, the fratricidal sea-fights with Genoa had cost a wealth of human life and treasure and, although Venice had annexed nearly a dozen provinces in half a century, the outlay had been out of proportion to the results. At the same time, the Venetians did not know that their splendid state was on the downward road. The new route to India was unknown. Columbus and Diaz had yet to withdraw the sea-borne commerce of the world from Venice to Spain, and so bring about the commercial ruin of the Republic, and the Republic, with her maritime trade and her wealth of spoils from the East, could furnish endless material for the artists who were rising in her midst. Everywhere there was colour in abundance, the “Purple East” cast a broad shadow upon the Adriatic. Then, again, it is worth remarking that the Venetian painters did not concern themselves, as their Florentine brothers did, with matters lying beyond the scope of their canvas, they did not dally with architecture or sculpture in the intervals of picture painting. In short, pictures represented the tribute of Venice to the arts, and this concentration was not without its influence upon the work done. Literature did not flourish, because the city reared few literary men and the tendency of the citizens was towards pleasure rather than study. All could admire a picture at a time when few could read a book, and the spirit of the Renaissance, fluttering over the Venetian Republic, had done little more than waken its people to a sense of the beauty of the human form. Although in the days when Gian Bellini was a little boy, the terror of the Turkish invasion was upon the eastern end of the Mediterranean, it had hardly reached Venice or, if it had, only through the medium of envoys and kings who came to ask the assistance of the Republic to keep the Turk from Constantinople. To these appeals the response of Venice in those days could not be very efficacious, but the envoys added a more flamboyant note to the city’s colouring, and served an artistic if not a political purpose.

Vasari tells us that Jacopo Bellini painted his pictures not on wood, but on canvas. “In Venice,” he writes naÏvely, “they do not paint on panel, or if they do use it occasionally they take no other wood but that of the fir, which is most abundant in that city, being brought along the river Adige in large quantities from Germany. It is the custom then in Venice to paint very much upon canvas, either because this material does not so readily split, is not liable to clefts, and does not suffer from the worm, or because pictures on canvas may be made of such size as is desired, and can also be sent whithersoever the owner pleases, with little cost and trouble.” Perhaps Vasari overlooked the effect of sea air upon open frescoed walls, although that effect was clear enough to the Venetians. But Jacopo, for all that he painted upon canvas, and was employed by some of the leading Venetian guilds, makes no outstanding figure upon the page of the art history of Venice. He seems to have lived prosperously, honourably, and intelligently, to have caught the earliest possible reflection of the growing spirit of paganism, thereby incurring the anger and mistrust of the Church party that had regarded painting as the proper intermediary between faith and the general public, to have pleased his state employers in Venice and Padua, and then to have died rather outside the odour of sanctity, leaving an honourable name behind him, and children who were destined to spread its fame far and wide.

Students of Gian Bellini’s life and work can see that only a part of the father’s teaching fell upon fruitful soil. Jacopo Bellini, as we have seen, was a man in whom the early religious spirit that the Renaissance did much to cloud over was of small account, but the pagan revival that found so many adherents in Florence and Venice, towards the close of the fifteenth century, left young Gian Bellini almost untouched. We shall see that the commissions offered by wealthy patrons, who had no love for sacred subjects, were either rejected, or were accepted and not fulfilled. It is surely permissible to believe that the teaching of early days had a lasting influence upon the outlook of the two Bellinis, and strengthened them in the determination to do work that appealed as much to their heart as to their hand. Certainly they followed conscience where it led them. In the case of Gian Bellini, with whom we are mostly concerned here, it is interesting to see that his long life, passed as it was in the very critical time that embraced the fall of Constantinople and the League of Cambrai, was completely free from cloud. His mind was formed very early. He worked strenuously, carefully, and in the fashion that pleased his conscience, till within a very short time of his death, and the serenity of his spirit, clearly revealed in a series of exquisite pictures, was untouched by all that happened in the world around him.

Changes came thick and fast upon Venice in the years when Bellini was hard at work, and new ideas were receiving acceptance on every hand. The Renaissance, with its revival of pagan thought in the train of learning, scattered new ideas throughout the Venetian studios. Bellini’s pupil and successor Titian could depict pagan goddess and Christian Deity with equal facility. Giorgione was travelling along the same paths when death overtook him, but Gian Bellini, while he continued to make progress in his art, refused to make any concession to the pagan spirit, and with one possible exception in the case of the Bacchanals, a picture painted for the Duke of Ferrara, now in the Alnwick Castle Collection, his last pictures were as devout in thought and feeling as the first.

It seems strange, perhaps, to express doubts about a picture that bears the painter’s signature, and has been freely accepted as the work of his hands, but we must not forget that the fifteenth-century painters in Italy were the directors of a school as well as the tenants of a studio. The Bellini and Vivarini families were at the head of Venetian painters, and consequently the best students of the time were attracted to their studios, content to mix colours, prepare canvases, and paint the less important parts of a commissioned picture. After a time they even painted pictures, and signed them with the master’s name. We have certain facts in connection with the Ferrara picture, and few facts are to be found in the case of any others. It is on record that Bellini took an unfinished picture to Ferrara, completed it under the eye of the Duke, and received eighty-five ducats for it. The question becomes whether this is the picture now at Alnwick that Titian finished, because those who know it say that the background has a landscape of the familiar Titian kind, with glimpses of Cadore and Pieve, where the younger painter was born. We are left, then, with the almost certain knowledge that Titian painted a part of the “Bacchanal” picture, and that the other part is opposed in sentiment to Bellini’s theories of art. So the sceptics do not lack a measure of justification.

In the latter days of his life Bellini’s studio became something like a factory, and there seems very little reason to doubt that some of his clever pupils like Bondinelli, Bissolo, Marconi, Catena and others were allowed to sign, with the master’s name, “Ioannes Bellinus,” pictures that had no more than the slightest acquaintance with the master’s brush. One of the most distinguished of our modern critics, Mr. Bernhard Berenson, attended an exhibition of Venetian pictures held in London a few years ago, and found that the great majority of the pictures attributed to Bellini were by his pupils. He pointed out then that the signature upon which the unfortunate owners were accustomed to lean was no better than a broken reed. Bellini, of course, was not the only offender in this respect. His great pupil Titian copied the master’s fault, and there is on record a letter from Frederic, Duke of Mantua, asking Titian to send out work that has his touch as well as his signature. With these facts before us, it becomes permissible to doubt whether Bellini, in the last years of a long life devoted to sacred work, elected to turn aside, and yield deliberately to the pagan movement he had opposed so long. We can find no other work of his hand that is directly opposed to his theories of religious art, though it is fair to remember that he had a very active mind, and even responded to the influence of his own great pupils Titian and Giorgione.