Giovanni Bellini: Influences croisées

Giovanni Bellini, Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels, ca. 1475, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Photo : © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Christoph Schmidt - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

With some fifty works from public and private European collections - some of them presented for the first time - this exhibition highlights the art of Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1435-1516), father of the Venetian School. Looking at the artistic influences on his pictorial language, is is the first exhibition on this theme in Europe. The museum describes its organisation as “chrono-thematic”, with Bellini’s paintings as the common thread, in dialogue with the ‘models’ that inspired them.

 Born into a family of artists, Giovanni Bellini frequented, with his brother Gentile, the studio of their father, Jacopo Bellini, a painter of Gothic training who soon mastered the principles of Florentine Renaissance art. The young artist immersed himself in the art alongside his father, brother and his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, whom his sister Nicolosia had just married. Classicism, sculptural forms, and a good command of Mantegna’s perspective had a great influence on the artist. His work became more monumental as a result of studying the works of Donatello, which were visible in Padua. 

 Bellini’s style took a different direction with the arrival in Venice of Antonello da Messina, who joined the Flemish taste for detail with the spatial constructions of the artists of central Italy. From Flemish art, Giovanni borrowed the technique of oil painting, bringing a new aesthetic inflection to his work. The Byzantine art, and more particularly the Byzantine Madonnas, was another source of inspiration for his representations of Virgins with Child. He also developed themes that had been depicted by younger painters, such as topographical landscapes inspired by Cima da Conegliano. Bellini’s latter period was characterised by more vibrant but highly modern strokes. In a unique way, it was the innovations of his best pupils—in particular, Giorgione and Titian—that pushed the older Bellini to reinvent his style. 

By presenting Bellini’s oeuvre and his artistic context, this exhibition will give visitors a better understanding of the way in which his pictorial language consisted of correspondences and an interplay of influences, which he skillfully synthesised through the mastery of colour and light. The exhibition will benefit from exceptional loans from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, in addition to loans from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Museo Correr, the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan, the Petit Palais in Paris, and the Louvre Museum, as well as numerous loans from private collections of works some of which have never before been shown to the public.