Fig. 229. Gentile Bellini. A Turkish Youth. Miniature.—Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston.
Such early works as the organ shutters of St. Mark’s and the processional banner with the portrait of the Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani, 1465, show that he based himself on Mantegna. His career, however, is associated with narrative mural paintings for the schools, in which work he developes a real originality. Whatever he painted in 1466 for the Great School of St. Mark was soon destroyed in a fire. It was presumably the fame of these canvases that got him in 1469 the titles of knight and count palatine. In 1479, being fifty years old, he was called to Constantinople to serve that cruel voluptuary, Sultan Mahomet II. Gentile’s portrait of him, now in the National Gallery, Figure [228], is an appalling piece of exact characterization. One feels the malignity of a character softened by vices, but retaining all mental lucidity and capacities for both cruelty and calculated self-indulgence. A more amiable souvenir of this trip is the exquisite miniature portrait of a young Moslem prince, Figure [229], which is at Fenway Court. Gentile brought back to Venice the new title of Pasha. We do not find him about his proper work until 1492, when he agrees to do “not for money but by superhuman inspiration” the new canvases necessitated by the fire in the Great School of St. Mark.
The greatest of these is the view of the Piazza of St. Mark’s with the procession made by the School itself on Corpus Christi day, Figure [230]. In the centre is their venerated relic of the True Cross. About it attention is fixed and almost military, relaxing gradually at the sides. There are hundreds of figures and scores of portraits in the picture, yet there is no smallness of presentation. Such eighteenth century town painters as Canale and his followers could hardly improve upon the truthfulness of the scene as regards light and air even. Its value as record is immense. And, barring a certain stiffness, its value as art is hardly less.
Fig. 230. Gentile Bellini. Corpus Christi Procession in Piazza of S. Marco.—Venice.
Another panel from this series shows Gentile’s really great capacity as an out-of-doors painter. It represents the miraculous recovery of the reliquary of the cross which had fallen into the canal. How perfectly the play of light over the encrusted and plastered palaces is felt, its shimmer upon the smooth water and through the moving crowds! In the essentials of plein-airisme we moderns have not so much surpassed this work. And if Gentile seems after all not quite a great artist, it is due to that impassivity which is proper to a luminist. With equal realism, Gentile’s imitator, Carpaccio, added sentiment, hence he is beloved and Gentile ignored. Yet early Venetian narrative painting is complete with Gentile, and from every consideration of naturalism it is immensely superior to anything produced at Florence in this period. It gains all the smaller points of representation with the most amazing ease, perhaps because it waives the greater issue of monumentality. It is well put together, but shows little selection, is even at its best rather casually full of persons and things. This produces, as compared with Florence, an odd reversal of conditions. The altar-piece, which in Florence is rather intimate, is in Venice far the most monumental type of painting. We study the development of monumental design better in Giovanni Bellini’s altar-backs than in his brother’s narratives. To Gentile, at once a searching spirit in details and a conservative on the whole, it must have been a great satisfaction to have perfected the narrative mode that his father had so brilliantly inaugurated.
Fig. 231. Giovanni Bellini. Pietà.—Milan.
After 1500, being in the seventies and ailing, old Gentile acquired the ominous habit of frequently making and unmaking wills. His last one, which became effective in 1507, left to his vigorous brother, Giovanni, the precious paternal sketch books and the heavy duty of finishing for St. Mark’s School the vast Canvas of St. Mark Preaching at Alexandria, which is now at Milan. Giovanni was nearly eighty himself, but he put the great work through handsomely.