Part 1 (1/2)

Bellini.

by George Hay.

INTRODUCTION

From the standpoint of the biographer, it is to be regretted that more of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth century were not a.s.sociated with the Church. In the days of the most interesting activity of painters and sculptors, the capacity to write was rarely met beyond the monasteries and few people took the trouble to record any impression of notable men in the early years of their career. We are apt to forget that, for one artist whose name is preserved to us to-day, there are a score of men whose work has perished, whose very names are forgotten. In middle life, or in old age, when commissions from Popes or Emperors had attracted the attention of the world at large to the best men of the time, there might be some chronicler found to make pa.s.sing but invaluable reference to those of his contemporaries whose names were common in men's mouths, but such notes were made in very haphazard fas.h.i.+on, they were not necessarily accurate, and might be founded upon personal observation or rumour, or even upon the prejudice that was inevitable when Italy was a congerie of opposing states. Latter-day historians grope painfully and conscientiously after the scanty records of great painters, searching the voluminous writings of men who have little to say, and very little authority for saying anything about the great personalities of the art world of their time. It is not surprising, under these circ.u.mstances, that despite much search the record of many lives that must have been fascinating cannot be found. We learn more of the man from his work than we can hope to learn from any written record and, as the taste for studying pictures grows, so all the internal evidence of a man's thought and ways of life acc.u.mulates and the message that underlies canvas and stands revealed in colour and line to the trained eye, is translated for the benefit of a curious generation. We learn to know what manner of man the painter was from the models he chose, the portraits he painted, the qualities and nature of his landscape, the expression of his joy in light and air, his feeling for flowers and birds. By a process of synthetical reasoning we come to see, though it be as in a gla.s.s, darkly, the picture that every man paints, from the years of his activity to the last year of his sojourn among mortals--that is the portrait of himself. Doubtless we are often misled, because as each critic, artist or layman, finds in the picture a reflection of what he takes there, it remains difficult to arrive at definite conclusions upon which all men can agree about any painter. Happily the effort pleases our own generation, and as there are many great men who flourished in the fifteenth century and have left their pictures to be their sole monument, there is no lack of work.

Naturally in this curious and inquisitive age there are some who would rather discover a well authenticated story about an artist's life than an unexpected masterpiece from his hand, but then the appeal of letters is always more widespread than that of paint. It is always pleasant to endeavour to supply a want, but it is only fair to remember that in writing about people whose life story was not preserved by their contemporaries, the path is strewn with pitfalls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--THE DOGE LOREDANO

This picture, which is of bust length and life size, is one of the ten examples of Giovanni Bellini in the National Gallery, and is perhaps the most important example of the artist as a portrait painter. The Doge wears his state robes and cap of office, and the picture is signed on a cartellino.]

In dealing with the Italians from the days of Cimabue to Clovio, it has been the custom to depend very largely upon the works of Giorgio Vasari, and to rely for later and more accurate information upon the volumes written by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, pa.s.sing from them to Morelli and Berenson. Vasari, to whom the students of Italian art, down to the middle of the sixteenth century, are so deeply indebted, was born in 1512, and lived for more than sixty years. He was a painter and architect, related to Luca Signorelli, and engaged for a great part of his life upon work in Arezzo. He was a great copyist, a painstaking writer, and never did critic wield a milder pen if he chanced to be writing of Florentine art, or a more prejudiced one if he dealt with things of Venice. He was first a patriot and then a critic. One night, he tells us, a friend of Monsignore Giovio expressed a wish to add to his library a treatise on men who had distinguished themselves in the arts of design, from the time of Cimabue down to the year of the conversation. Vasari undertook the work and founded it, he says, upon notes and memoranda which he had made from the time when he was a boy.

The compilation was finished about the year 1547, it was written at a time when the painter was very busy with commissions. He did his best in a certain prejudiced fas.h.i.+on, and the result for all its defects is very valuable. Naturally enough Vasari had not too large a share of the gifts required for his task, nor had he the necessary facts before him for writing really reliable history. Much that he wrote was accepted _faute de mieux_, but modern researches have necessitated a revision of very many estimates that Vasari formed for us, together with a considerable portion of his facts, and we have learned to understand something of the source and direction of his prejudices.

The literary union of Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who started their joint work in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with better equipment of facts and a larger measure of critical insight, has been far more valuable, and a complete popular edition of their work revised by sympathetic and well qualified writers is greatly to be desired; but in no case can we regard a volume devoted to the biographies of scores of artists as being altogether reliable. The spirit of study is abroad, to-day men will devote more time to the life story of a comparatively obscure artist than they would have given fifty years ago to half-a-dozen painters of European reputation. It is not easy, one might almost say it is not possible, to tell succinctly the story of men who have left no clear record and were not regarded by their contemporaries as fit and proper subjects for a biography. At best we can study the available sources of information, and use such measure of judgment as is in us to construct a reasonable and likely narrative. To delve in all manner of likely and unlikely places, to study and make allowances for the prejudices of the time, to rely upon the painted canvas to confirm or confute the printed word--these are the tasks of the conscientious biographer who must not be ill content if, after sifting an intolerable amount of chaff, he can find a few forgotten grains of corn.

I

GIAN BELLINI'S YOUTH

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 rect.i.tude, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.ses 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 flouris.h.i.+ng secular inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.sociated with the year 1430.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--ANGEL PLAYING A LUTE

This is a detail from an altar-piece formerly in the Church of San Giobbe. The work is now in the Academy of Venice.]

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 a.s.sistance 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 navely, ”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 quant.i.ties 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 sanct.i.ty, 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, pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 t.i.tian could depict pagan G.o.ddess 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 Baccha.n.a.ls, 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 t.i.tian finished, because those who know it say that the background has a landscape of the familiar t.i.tian kind, with glimpses of Cadore and Pieve, where the younger painter was born. We are left, then, with the almost certain knowledge that t.i.tian painted a part of the ”Baccha.n.a.l” 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.