We apprehend the difference at once in Bastiani and in Mansueti, who essay the same sort of compositions. They studied grouping carefully, and it must have seemed easy enough to paint their careful architecture and to place citizens in costume with appropriate action in a “Miracle of the Cross,” or the “Preaching of St. Mark”; but these pictures are dry and crowded, they give no illusion of truth, there is none of the careless realism of Carpaccio’s crowds,—of incidents taking place which are not essential to the story, and, as in life, are only half seen, but which have their share in producing a full and varied illusion. The scenes want the air and depth in which Carpaccio’s pictures are enveloped. We are not stimulated and charmed, taken into the outer air and refreshed by these heavy personages, standing in rows, painted in hot, dry colour, and carrying no conviction in their glance and action.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Berlin.Madonna and Saints; Consecration of Stephen.
Ferrara.Death of Virgin.
Milan.Presentation of Virgin; Marriage of Virgin; St. Stephen disputing.
Paris.St. Stephen preaching.
Stuttgart.Martyrdom of St. Stephen.
Venice.Academy: The History of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins; Presentation in the Temple.
Museo Correr: Visitation; Two Courtesans.
S. Giorgio degli Schiavone: History of SS. George and Tryphonius; Agony in the Garden; Christ in the House of the Pharisee; History of St. Jerome.
S. Vitale: Altarpiece to S. Vitale.
Lady Layard. Death of the Virgin; St. Ursula taking leave of her Father.
Vienna.Christ adored by Angels.

CHAPTER XI

GIOVANNI BELLINI

The difference between Gian. Bellini and his accomplished brother, that which makes us so conscious that the first was the greater of the two and which sets him in a later artistic generation than Gentile, is a difference of mind. Such pageant-pictures as we hear that Giovanni was engaged upon have all been destroyed. We may suspect that their composition was not particularly congenial to him, and that the strictly religious pictures and the small allegorical studies, by which we must judge him, were more after his heart. It is his poetic and ideal feeling which adds so strongly to his claim to be a great artist; it was this which drew all men to him and enabled him so powerfully to influence the art of his day in Venice.

Jacopo’s wife, Anna, in a will of 1429, leaves everything to her two sons, Gentile and Niccolo. Giovanni was evidently not her son, but Vasari speaks of him as the elder of the two, so that it is very possible that he was an illegitimate child, brought up, after the fashion that so often obtained, in the full privileges of his father’s house. Documents show that Jacopo Bellini was living in Venice in 1437, first near the Piazza, and afterwards in the parish of San Lio. He was a member of S. Giovanni Evangelista, and probably one of the leading artists of the city. His two sons helped him in his great decorative works, and also went with him to Padua, where he painted the Gattamalata Chapel. Their relative position is suggested by a document of 1457, which records that the father received twenty-one ducats for “three figures, done on cloth, put in the Great Hall of the Patriarch,” only two of which were to go to the son. In 1459 Gian. Bellini’s signature first appears on a document, and at about this time we may suppose that he and his brother began to execute small commissions on their own account. On these visits to Padua the intimacy must have sprung up, which led to Mantegna’s marriage in 1453 with Jacopo’s daughter. At Padua, too, Bellini, in company with Mantegna, drank in the inspiration left there by Donatello, the greatest master that either of them encountered. It was the humanistic and naturalistic side of Donatello which touched Giovanni Bellini, more than all his classic lore. It chimed in, too, with his father’s graceful and fanciful quality, and there is no doubt that the Venetian painters soon exercised a marked influence on Mantegna. They “fought for him with Squarcione,” and even in the Eremitani frescoes he begins to lose his purely statuesque type and to become frankly Renaissance. In the later scenes of the series a pergola with grapes, a Venetian campanile and doorway replace his classic towers and arches of triumph. In the “Martyrdom of St. James” the couple walking by and paying no attention whatever to the tragic event, are very like the people whom Gentile introduces in his backgrounds.

There are few documents more interesting in the history of art than the two pictures of the “Agony in the Garden,” executed by the brothers-in-law, about 1455, from a design by Jacopo in the British Museum sketch-book. Jacopo draws the mound-like hill, Christ kneeling before the vision of the Chalice, the figures wrapt in slumber, and the distant town. In few pictures up to this time is the landscape conceived in such sympathy with the figures. As we look at this sketch and examine the two finished compositions, which it is so fortunate to find in juxtaposition in the National Gallery, we surmise that the two artists agreed to carry out the same idea and each to give his version of Jacopo’s suggestion, and very curious it is to see the rendering each has produced.