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, passed 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 fashion 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 Titian could depict pagan goddess 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 Bacchanals, 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 Titian finished, because those who know it say that the background has a landscape of the familiar Titian kind, with glimpses of Cadore and Pieve, where the younger painter was born. We are left, then, with the almost certain knowledge that Titian painted a part of the “Bacchanal” 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.
PLATE IV.—MADONNA WITH THE HOLY CHILD ASLEEP
This is one of the most beautiful of the painter’s studies of a familiar theme, and appeals to the spectator from the literary as well as the artistic side. The original is in the Venice Academy.
In the latter days of his life Bellini’s studio became something like a factory, and there seems very little reason to doubt that some of his clever pupils like Bondinelli, Bissolo, Marconi, Catena and others were allowed to sign, with the master’s name, “Ioannes Bellinus,” pictures that had no more than the slightest acquaintance with the master’s brush. One of the most distinguished of our modern critics, Mr. Bernhard Berenson, attended an exhibition of Venetian pictures held in London a few years ago, and found that the great majority of the pictures attributed to Bellini were by his pupils. He pointed out then that the signature upon which the unfortunate owners were accustomed to lean was no better than a broken reed. Bellini, of course, was not the only offender in this respect. His great pupil Titian copied the master’s fault, and there is on record a letter from Frederic, Duke of Mantua, asking Titian to send out work that has his touch as well as his signature. With these facts before us, it becomes permissible to doubt whether Bellini, in the last years of a long life devoted to sacred work, elected to turn aside, and yield deliberately to the pagan movement he had opposed so long. We can find no other work of his hand that is directly opposed to his theories of religious art, though it is fair to remember that he had a very active mind, and even responded to the influence of his own great pupils Titian and Giorgione.
II
MIDDLE LIFE
It is not easy to say how far a great painter reflects his time and how far he influences it. Tradition and surroundings must needs count for much, but their exact value is not easy to estimate. Indeed the influence of a man is often strongest upon the generations that succeed to his own, for no hints are left of the doubts and difficulties that beset the master. The attitude of the Venetians towards art in the fifteenth century, when Gian Bellini started his work, differed from that of the Florentines by reason of the splendid isolation of Venice. The State was a law to herself; she instituted her own customs, she ruled her own life. Her wars had less effect than her commercial victories upon those of her citizens who turned their thoughts towards art, the stress and strife beyond her boundaries left her artists comparatively untouched. The wider significance of the Renaissance hardly reached her, her people were not only pleasure-loving, but self-centred. Happily, Jacopo Bellini was by way of being a traveller and his experiences were not lost upon his children. He knew Florence and worked in the city at a time when her great men were beginning to rise in all their lasting glory, he may have seen Brunelleschi himself at work upon the Duomo. He knew Padua, where the tradition of Giotto was very strong, though that great master himself had long passed away, and so he brought to the art he practised in his own city something of the technique of the new movement, as well as the very definite touch of the pagan sentiment that was to be developed in all its beauty by his son’s pupils Titian and Giorgione. The effect of his travels, limited though they were, was very lasting, and though Gian Bellini did not see life as his father had seen it, his work paved the way for the masters whose work was in some aspects greater than his. In his early days Venice had no very distinctive art. What there was seems to have been ecclesiastical in thought and extremely formal in design. It was the appeal of the clericals to a people who could neither write nor read, but although a State may erect boundaries and may devote itself to the enjoyment of prosperity, those who care for the claims of art cannot escape altogether from the forces that are at work in surrounding cities. One of the chief forces at work in Northern Italy was the revival of learning that seems to have marched side by side with the discovery of personal beauty. The Church had kept beauty in the background, the Renaissance brought it to the canvas of every artist. Bellini turned the discovery of personal beauty to the service of the Madonna.