726. CHRIST'S AGONY IN THE GARDEN.
Giovanni Bellini (Venetian: 1426-1516). See 189.
An early work of the master, painted probably about 1459 (nearly half a century earlier than the Doge's portrait, 189), but interesting as showing the advance made by him in landscape. "We see for the first time an attempt to render a particular effect of light, the first twilight picture with clouds rosy with the lingering gleams of sunset, and light shining from the sky on hill and town—the first in which a head is seen in shadow against a brilliant sky" (Monkhouse: The Italian Pre-Raphaelites, p. 73). "In the figures of the Apostles, especially in the one on the left, the repose of sleep is expressed in so admirable and convincing a manner, that it would be difficult to name a second painter of the quattro-cento who could compare with Bellini in this respect" (Richter). Nor is the advance one in the technique of art only. The picture is one of the earliest in which art made use of what Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy"—in which, that is, art represents nature as sympathising with human emotion. Bellini "called in nature," says Mr. Hodgson, R.A. (Magazine of Art, 1886, p 215), "to sympathise with human sorrows, or rather he was the first to point out that nature takes her colouring and her aspects from the conditions of our passions and sentiments.[173] That sombre sky, with its gleam along the horizon, that long dark hill, the wild plain over which the traitor and his accomplices are stealing, have exactly the aspect which they would present to one who stood there knowing that a horrible treason was going to be perpetrated." Compare, for this "pathetic fallacy" in painting, Titian's "Noli me tangere" (No. 270). Bellini's picture should be compared with Mantegna's of the same subject in an adjoining room (1417). Mantegna seizes only the sublimity of the idea of the Agony, Bellini's penetrating sympathy renders its infinite pathos. Mantegna's picture is in some technical respects the more accomplished; "but in all that concerns the imaginative conception of the subject, in the harmonising of all the accessories to produce a single profound impression on the emotions, above all in the large and reposeful spaciousness of the composition, Bellini is surely the more to be admired" (Roger Fry: Giovanni Bellini, p. 22). Both pictures may be profitably compared with Correggio's of the same subject, in which we are introduced to a new order of ideas (See notes on No. 76).