George Hay

Shortly after the Council Hall pictures had been undertaken, in 1479, to be exact, the Sultan, Mohammed II., conqueror of Constantinople, wished to have his portrait painted, and applied to the Doge of Venice to send him a competent artist to do the work. It should be remembered that the Sultan had been waging a successful war upon Venice, and that in January 1479 the State had ceded Scutari, Stalimene, and other territory and had agreed to pay an indemnity of 200,000 ducats, with a tribute of 10,000 ducats a year for trading rights and the exercise of consular jurisdiction in Constantinople. Naturally the success of the Turks, who had taken Constantinople in 1454, was making a very great impression throughout Europe, and Venice had striven to the uttermost to rouse the Powers to concerted action, but in those days nobody was anxious to trust the Republic. These are matters, of course, that pertain to history rather than art, but it is curious to remember that throughout the times when the watchers from St. Mark’s Tower saw the reflected glare of burning cities, when the security of Christian Europe was threatened seriously, when plagues were devastating Venice, Gian Bellini seems to have gone on his way all undisturbed, painting his pictures in the most leisurely fashion, and the fact that art stood right above politics and strife is clearly shown in the action of the Sultan in sending to Venice for a good artist as soon as peace had been restored. There seems to have been some question of sending Gian because his brother was busily engaged on other work in the Ducal Palace, but after a while it was decided to send Gentile, who painted a portrait of the Sultan that found its way afterwards into the Layard Collection in Venice. Some surprise has been expressed that the Sultan should have allowed any one to paint his portrait, because portrait painting is forbidden by the Koran[1], but Mohammed II. was a man of very advanced ideas and he not only gave sittings to Gentile Bellini, but treated him with the greatest favour, dismissing him with many marks of approval and great gifts. Among the presents brought back to Venice by the painter were the armour and sword of the great Doge Dandolo, who had been buried in the year 1205 in the private chapel in St. Sophia. Mohammed II. had caused the great tomb to be destroyed, but he sent the great patriot’s armour back to its native land. Vasari tells us that the meeting between the brothers on Gentile’s return to Venice was most affectionate.

[1] Mohammed said: “If ye must make pictures, make them of trees and things without souls. Verily every painter is condemned to hell fire.”

This journey to Constantinople would seem to have added to the reputation of the house of Bellini, and to have increased the demand for portraits by both brothers. This, in its way, would doubtless have led to the multiplying of school pieces. History has very little to tell of the progress of the brothers during the years that followed. We know that the Doge Loredano, whose portrait has been painted by Gian Bellini, succeeded to his high office in 1501, that Titian would have been working in Bellini’s studio then, and that Bellini himself was in the enjoyment of what was known as a broker’s patent, and was official painter to the State. His was the duty of painting the portrait of every Doge who succeeded to the control of Venetian affairs during his term of office, and he also painted any historical picture in which the Doge had to figure. There was a salary attached to the office, and the work was quite light. As far as we can tell Gian Bellini was still averse from painting secular subjects. He was now an old man, but he had made great progress in his work, conquering many of the difficulties of perspective, shadow, and colouring that had baffled his predecessors. The pageants demanded by the great Mutual Aid Societies (Scuole) from the artists in their employ, he would seem to have left to his brother Gentile, for these pictures had a big political purpose to serve, and they demanded the travel, the experience, and the mood that Gian lacked. His brush was sufficiently occupied with altar-pieces and portraits of distinguished Venetians, now, alas, lost to the world.

One incident that is not without its instructive side in this connection is recorded in the year 1501, when Isabella, Duchess of Mantua, sent her agent in Venice to Gian Bellini to arrange with him to paint a secular subject. The old painter, now in the neighbourhood of his seventieth year, accepted money on account, and then turned his thoughts to other things. The agent worried him from time to time with little or no effect, and wrote despairing letters to the Duchess to convey Bellini’s various excuses. Not until 1504, when the Duchess was proposing to take legal action, was the picture finished, and then it does not seem to have been what was required. At the same time it must have been a work of great merit, because a year later we find the Duchess commissioning another picture, and asking for a secular subject, which the old painter after much hesitation refused to paint.

Happily Isabella d’Este was not only a voluminous letter writer, but her correspondence has been preserved, and some forty letters were written in connection with the Bellini picture, by the lady whom Cardinal Bembo called “the wisest and most fortunate of women,” and of whom a poet wrote, “At the sound of her name all the Muses rise and do reverence.” She had seen Bellini’s work, and had admired it in Venice, before she asked a friend, one Signor Vianello, to secure a picture for her camerino. At first the old painter raised objections, says Vianello. “I am busy working for the Signory in the Palace,” he said, “and I cannot leave my work from early morning until after dinner.” Then he asked for 150 ducats and said he would make time, then he came down to 100 ducats and accepted 25 on account Then as has been explained, he declared that he could not undertake the class of subject that the Duchess wanted, and Isabella wrote to say that she would accept anything antique that had a fine meaning. Vianello writes in reply to say that Bellini has gone to his country villa and cannot be reached, and the correspondence and the years pass, until at last the Duchess gets quite cross and writes, “We can no longer endure the villainy of Giovanni Bellini,” and goes on to instruct her agent to make application to the Doge, Leonardo Loredano, the one whose portrait, painted by Giovanni Bellini, is in our National Gallery, to commit the old painter for fraud. To this action Bellini responds by showing Vianello that he has a “Nativity” three parts finished, and after a time he sends it to the Duchess together with a very humble letter of apology, that the lady is good enough to accept. She even writes, “Your ‘Nativity’ is as dear to us as any picture we possess.”

In 1506 Albert DÜrer was in Venice where he declares that he found the Venetians very pleasant companions, and adds with sly sarcasm that some of them knew how to paint. At the same time he records his fear lest any of them should put poison in his food, but speaks in high terms and without suspicion of Gian Bellini who had praised his work and offered to buy a picture. All these things are small matters enough, but unhappily the records of Bellini’s life are so scanty that it is hard to find anything more until the year 1513 when Gian Bellini, well over eighty, found his position as official painter challenged by his pupil Titian, who presented a petition to the Council of Ten, stating inter alia that he was desirous of a little fame rather than of profit, that he had refused to serve the Pope, and that he wanted the first broker’s patent that should be vacant in the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi on the same conditions as those granted to Messer Zuan Bellin.[1] The work that was being done was the restoration of the Great Hall of the Council, and the painting had been in progress for some forty years, Gian Bellini and two pupils being now engaged upon it. There is no doubt that this application by Titian annoyed Bellini’s friends and pupils, and even to us it seems a little unreasonable and in bad form to clamour so eagerly for a place that was already occupied. But it would seem to have been the custom of the time to apply early for any privilege of this kind, for we find in later years that Tintoretto applied for Titian’s place long before the older master’s capacity for working had come to an end.

Bellini’s friends were successful, although it would appear that the old painter’s progress had been too slow completely to satisfy the Council of Ten. In the following year Titian, who had been allowed to start work, was told that he must wait until older claims were satisfied, the expenses of his assistants were disallowed, and his commission came to an end. In the autumn of that year Titian brought another petition to the Council, asking once more for the first vacant broker’s patent, and mentioning the fact that Bellini’s days could not be long in the land. Just about this time the Venetian authorities seem to have held an inquiry into the progress of the work that was being done in the Hall of the Great Council, only to find that the amount of money they had spent should have secured them a far larger amount of work than had been accomplished. It is hardly surprising that these inquiries should have become necessary, there must have been a great laxity in the State departments in the years following the working out of the plans that had been made by France, Austria, Spain, and the Pope at Cambrai. In the last few years Venice had been fighting for her life, Lombardy had passed out of her hands, Verona, Vicenza, and Padua had followed. The Republic had even been forced to seek aid from the Sultans of Turkey and Egypt, and although Venice was destined to emerge from her troubles and light the civilised world a little longer there is small cause for wonder if, in the times of exceptional excitement, her statesmen had not given their wonted attention to the progress of the arts. Doubtless Gian Bellini’s leisurely methods and failing strength were accountable for the slow progress of the pictures in the Council Hall, and Titian took advantage of the fact to send in a third petition, offering to finish some work at his own expense, but he had no occasion to take much more trouble.

On November 29, 1516, Gian Bellini died, well on the road to his ninetieth year, “and there were not wanting in Venice,” says Vasari, “those who by sonnets and epigrams sought to do him honour after his death as he had done honour to himself and his country during his life.” One cannot help thinking that half-a-dozen pages of biography would have been worth a bushel of sonnets.

With Gian Bellini the last great painter of purely religious subjects passed away. He had stood between art and paganism. Perhaps the younger men found him narrow and pedantic, but it is certain that so long as Gian Bellini was the leading painter of Venice it was not easy for pictures to respond to the ever growing demands that followed the Renaissance. Now the road was clear, painting was to reach its highest point in the work of Giorgione and Titian, and was then to decline almost as rapidly as it had risen.

Gian Bellini for all the wide influence that he exerted, not only upon contemporary painting, but upon sculpture too, sent very little work out of Venice. Examples are to be seen in cities that are comparatively close at hand, Rimini, Pesaro, Vicenza, Bergamo, and Turin, but his genius seems to have been too completely recognised in his own city for his work to travel far afield, and the portrait of himself in the Uffizi Gallery is no more than a pupil’s work with a studio signature. One of his last undisputed paintings was for the altar of St. Crisostom in Venice. It is said that he painted it at the age of eighty-five. After death his fame suffered by the rise of those stars of Venetian painting, Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoretto, and throughout three centuries his work was held in comparatively small esteem, perhaps because it was often judged by the studio pictures with the forged signatures. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century nobody seemed quite to know the real pictures from the false ones, but with the rise of critics like Crowe, Morelli, and Berenson a much better state of things has been established. Copies and student works have been separated from the originals, careful study of technique and mannerism has made clear a large number of points that were doubtful and in dispute, and although the process of separating the sheep from the goats has reduced considerably the number of works that can be accepted as genuine, the gain to the artist’s reputation atones for the loss.

The plates are printed by Bemrose Dalziel, Ltd., Watford
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh