It is not easy to say how far a great painter reflects his time and how far he influences it. Tradition and surroundings must needs count for much, but their exact value is not easy to estimate. Indeed the influence of a man is often strongest upon the generations that succeed to his own, for no hints are left of the doubts and difficulties that beset the master. The attitude of the Venetians towards art in the fifteenth century, when Gian Bellini started his work, differed from that of the Florentines by reason of the splendid isolation of Venice. The State was a law to herself; she instituted her own customs, she ruled her own life. Her wars had less effect than her commercial victories upon those of her citizens who turned their thoughts towards art, the stress and strife beyond her boundaries left her artists comparatively untouched. The wider significance of the Renaissance hardly reached her, her people were not only pleasure-loving, but self-centred. Happily, Jacopo Bellini was by way of being a traveller and his experiences were not lost upon his children. He knew Florence and worked in the city at a time when her great men were beginning to rise in all their lasting glory, he may have seen Brunelleschi himself at work upon the Duomo. He knew Padua, where the tradition of Giotto was very strong, though that great master himself had long passed away, and so he brought to the art he practised in his own city something of the technique of the new movement, as well as the very definite touch of the pagan sentiment that was to be developed in all its beauty by his son’s pupils Titian and Giorgione. The effect of his travels, limited though they were, was very lasting, and though Gian Bellini did not see life as his father had seen it, his work paved the way for the masters whose work was in some aspects greater than his. In his early days Venice had no very distinctive art. What there was seems to have been ecclesiastical in thought and extremely formal in design. It was the appeal of the clericals to a people who could neither write nor read, but although a State may erect boundaries and may devote itself to the enjoyment of prosperity, those who care for the claims of art cannot escape altogether from the forces that are at work in surrounding cities. One of the chief forces at work in Northern Italy was the revival of learning that seems to have marched side by side with the discovery of personal beauty. The Church had kept beauty in the background, the Renaissance brought it to the canvas of every artist. Bellini turned the discovery of personal beauty to the service of the Madonna.

Students of the life of Fra Angelico know that a Dominican preacher exercised a very great effect upon the painter’s life, and was responsible for sending him, at a very early age, to the great Convent of the Dominicans at Fiesole. There he was received as a brother, and from the shelter of the cloister he gave his art message to the world, his story being preserved to us at the same time because the progress of the Dominicans was recorded. A few years later Giovanni Bellini, then a boy newly in his teens, would seem to have fallen under a very similar influence. He was not fourteen when St. Bernardino came to Padua and preached the doctrine of godliness and Jew-baiting to a people who were not ill-disposed towards asceticism. In the fifteenth century a boy of fourteen was a man. The Pope made Cardinals of lads who were still younger and many, who have left their names written large in Italian history, were married when they were fifteen. Gian Bellini would have been assisting his father in the decoration of the Gattemelata Chapel of Padua at the time and there is no doubt that St. Bernardino’s addresses impressed him very deeply. To be sure he did not go into a religious house after the fashion of Fra Angelico, but he turned his thoughts towards religion, and for the rest of his long life his brush was kept almost exclusively for the service of sacred art. The tendencies towards paganism that his father is known to have shown held no attraction for him. He sought to express the beauty of the New Testament stories, and it is hard to find throughout all Italy an artist whose achievements in that direction can vie with his, for Gian Bellini brought sensuous beauty and rare qualities of emotion to canvas for the first time in the history of painting.

In those early days of the middle century there were two acknowledged leaders of painting in the world that young Bellini knew. The first was his father, who is said to have studied in the studios of Gentile da Fabriano (1370 to 1450), and that of Pisanello who was born somewhere about the same time as da Fabriano, and died a year later. It is worth noting that Jacopo Bellini called one of his sons Gentile after his earliest master, though whether Gentile or Giovanni was the elder son remains uncertain. Mr. Roger Fry, who writes with great authority upon the subject, is of opinion that Gian may have been a natural son of Jacopo, and in those days when Popes had “nephews” in abundance, and the marriage vow was more honoured in the breach than the observance, very little stigma attached to illegitimacy. The other great painter of Gian Bellini’s time was the Paduan painter Squarcione, who presided over a large and flourishing school in his native city, and did work that was quite as good as that of his contemporaries. He adopted as his son a lad from Padua or Mantua named Andrea Mantegna, who was destined to take such high rank among the painters of the Venetian School.

Although Padua and Venice were in a sense rivals, there seems to have been a very friendly understanding for many years between Squarcione and Jacopo Bellini, so that Gian and Gentile were able to watch the progress of the Paduan master and his pupils, and to decide for themselves how much they would accept, and what they would reject of the teaching. In early years these influences must have been of great value to the painter, but happily they were not destined to be lasting, for when Gian’s sister married Andrea Mantegna, Squarcione quarrelled with his adopted son, and the intimacy with the Bellini family came to an end. This is as it should have been in the best interests of Gian Bellini’s art, for when he returned to Venice and settled down there permanently, he was able to follow his own ideas, and free himself from what was bad in the influence of the stiff, formal, and lifeless school of Padua.

Venice must have been a remarkable city in those years. To-day it stimulates the imagination as few cities in Europe can do, then it must have been one of the wonders of the world. There are some striking accounts of the city written in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and though space does not permit any quotation at length, one brief paragraph will not be out of place. Philippe de Comines, envoy of Charles VIII., came to Venice in 1494, and recalled his impressions of that city in his memoirs. “I was taken along the High Street,” he writes, “they call it the Grand Canal, and it is very broad, galleys cross it; and it is the fairest street, I believe, that may be in the whole world, and fitted with the best houses; the ancient ones are painted, and most have a great piece of porphyry and serpentine on the front. It is the most triumphant city I have ever seen, and doth most honour to ambassadors and strangers. It doth most wisely govern itself, and the service of God is most solemnly performed. Though the Venetians have many faults, I believe God has them in remembrance for the reverence they pay in the service of His Church.” This brief tribute to the charm of Venice is of special value because it helps us to understand why the Venetians were not strenuous seekers after knowledge, why their painters did no more than paint, and why their response to the humanities was so small. It explains the decorative quality of Bellini’s pictures, the splendour of their colours. Pageantry and ceremonial were the great desires of Venetian life, the man who could add to the lustre of a State procession along the splendid water-way of the Grand Canal was more to them than the scholar who had written a treatise that moved the more learned Florentines to admiration. Life was so full of pleasure, so varied in its appeals, that the Venetians could not spare time, or even develop the will to study. They had raised the old cry “panem et circenses” and, in the days of Gian Bellini, there was no lack of either. History is full of records that reveal other nations in a similar light, philosophers have drawn the inevitable conclusions—and the trend of life is no wise altered.

Under Bellini, painting lost the conventions that had been regarded as correct or inevitable in Squarcione’s studio, and Gian’s pictures bear the same relation to those of the Paduan, and his pupil, as Newman’s writing bears to bad eighteenth-century English prose. But despite all developments in the technique of his art, Gian Bellini’s painting remained quite constant to the mood that St. Bernardino had induced. Doubtless, had his gifts been of another kind, he would have entered the Church, he would have dreamed dreams and seen visions that would not have found such world-wide expression while, being an artist, inheriting artistic traditions from his father, living in the centre of the small world of Venetian and Paduan painters, he expressed his beautiful emotions in fashion that has not weakened its claim upon us in more than four hundred years. The glamour of Venetian life, the extraordinary beauty of the city that was his home, the splendour and the pageants that were part of a Venetian life, the intensity of the colour that surrounded him on all sides—some of it belonging to Venice by right, and even more, brought to her shores by the ceaseless traffic of the sea—all these things developed and deepened the emotion that was to find so exquisite an expression from his brush. To him, as to Fra Angelico, faith was a real and living thing, and like the great monk who died at ripe age while he was yet a boy, Gian Bellini became a lover of the world in its most picturesque aspect, accepting without hesitation the traditional explanation of its creation.

Naturally enough his appeal to the artist is founded upon a dozen considerations, mostly technical, his appeal to the layman is direct and spontaneous. A countryman who has never seen a studio can respond to the exquisite beauty of Bellini’s Virgins and Children, can feel the charm of the sunshine that fills the air and lights sea and land, can recognise the infinite glamour of the roads that wind away into the mysterious distance of the background, can enjoy the rich, almost sensuous, colouring. Perhaps had Bellini taken the vows, a great part of these beauties would have been lost, the infinite variety of lovely women and children could hardly have been secured. As a Venetian, and a pleasure lover, he could not have responded, as Fra Angelico did, to the restricted life and rigid discipline of a religious order.

It was not easy for Gian Bellini to devote himself entirely to sacred subjects if he wished to earn a living by his brush, because his father had stood outside the Church. In those days, too, the best churchwork was in the hands of one family, the Vivarini, whose monopoly was hardly likely to be disturbed by an artist who could show no better credentials than a connection, legitimate or illegitimate, with a painter whose feeling was distinctly pagan. Jacopo Bellini, for all that he was a most admired artist, had no claims upon the Church, and does not seem to have received many commissions from it. Various wealthy societies in Venice had been accustomed to employ him to decorate their halls with work that, as we have said before, has been lost, and their guilds or scuole would doubtless have given Gian all the work he wished to do had he been satisfied to do it.

He could not choose for himself. St. Bernardino had chosen for him in those years when his mind was most impressionable. Gian Bellini’s hand was doubtless to be seen in Padua where he assisted his father, and his earliest independent work is to be found in the Casa Correr at Venice, where one finds a “Transfiguration,” a “Crucifixion,” and two “Pietas.” He painted portraits, one from our own National Gallery is to be seen here. This is a picture of the Doge, Leonardo Loredano, who held office from 1501 to 1521.

The early pictures reveal Bellini at the parting of the ways. His figures have many of the defects of the School of Padua. His knowledge of anatomy is decidedly small, he lacks confidence in himself, and yet it is not difficult to recognise that the painter is moving into a new country, that his presentation of sacred subjects is developing on lines that must add considerably to their artistic value and to the permanence of their appeal.

An amusing story is told of the way in which young Bellini acquired his knowledge of oil painting. He is said to have assumed the dress of a Venetian nobleman, and to have gone to the studio of a popular artist of the time, under pretext of having his portrait painted. While the artist, one Antonello of Messina, was busily engaged upon his portrait, Bellini is said to have watched the process very carefully and to have secured the much needed lesson. It is more than likely that the story is untrue, but it has obtained a large measure of credence.

His first big altar-piece is said to have been done for the altar of St. Catherine of Sienna, and after one or two other church paintings had been accomplished, Giovanni was commissioned to decorate the great Council Hall of Venice with historical paintings. But it is well to remember that altar painting never ceased to interest him, his greatest achievements having been accomplished for churches. There are few things in art more beautiful than Gian Bellini’s altar-pieces. Ruskin has paid a special tribute to the “Virgin and Four Saints” in the church dedicated to St. Zaccaria, father of the Baptist. He says that the Zaccaria altar-piece, and the one in the Frari, by the same master, are the two finest pictures in the world. Of the big works, however, nothing remains, Gentile being the only one of the family who is represented to-day by pictures painted on a very large scale. Vasari tells us that Gian painted four pictures in fulfilment of a commission, one representing the Pope Alexander III. receiving Frederic Barbarossa after the abjuration of the Schism of 1177, the next showing the Pope saying Mass in San Marco, another representing his Holiness in the act of presenting a canopy to the Doge, and the last in which the Pontiff is presented with eight standards and eight silver trumpets by clergy assembled outside the gates of Rome. These subjects or some of them had been painted by one Gueriento of Verona when Marco Corner was Doge. Petrarch had written the inscriptions for them, but they had faded, and in later years Tintoretto painted his “Paradiso” over the damaged frescoes. There is a story to the effect that Giovanni and Gentile Bellini had promised the councillors that their pictures should last two hundred years; as a matter of fact, they would seem to have been destroyed by fire within half that period.

The style of the picture commissioned makes its own significant commentary upon the times. It was always considered advisable to stir in the Venetians appreciation for State ceremonial, which encouraged so much of the pageantry associated with Venetian life and, even if Giovanni Bellini had no keen taste for such work, he could not refuse a commission that would establish his name among his fellow countrymen. To-day the Sala del Maggior Consiglio holds pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese, and other artists who followed closely upon Gian Bellini’s era.