Part 6 (1/2)
In 1507, at Gentile's death, Giovanni undertook, at his brother's dying request, to finish the ”Preaching of St. Mark,” receiving as a recompense that coveted sketch-book of his father's, from which he had adopted so many suggestions, and which, though he was the eldest, had been inherited by the legitimate son.
In the preceding year Albert Durer had visited Venice for the second time, and Bellini had received him with great cordiality. Durer writes, ”Bellini is very old, but is still the best painter in Venice”; and adds, ”The things I admired on my last visit, I now do not value at all.” Implying that he was able now to see how superior Bellini was to the hitherto more highly esteemed Vivarini.
At the very end of Bellini's life, in 1514, the Duke of Ferrara paid him eighty-five ducats for a painting of ”Baccha.n.a.ls,” now at Alnwick Castle; which may be looked upon as an open confession by one who had always considered himself as a painter of distinctively religious works, that such a gay scene of feasting afforded opportunities which he could not resist, for beauty of att.i.tude and colour; but the G.o.ds, sitting at their banquet in a sunny glade, are almost fully draped, and there is little of the _abandon_ which was affected by later painters. The picture was left unfinished, and was later given to t.i.tian to complete.
In his capacity as State Painter to the Republic, it was Bellini's duty to execute the official portraits of the Doges. During his long life he saw eleven reigns, and during four he held the State appointment.
Besides the official, he painted private portraits of the Doges, and that of Doge Loredano, in the National Gallery, is one of the most perfect presentments of the quattrocento. This portrait, painted by one old man of another, shows no weakening in touch or characterisation. It is as brilliant and vigorous as it is direct and simple. The face is quiet and unexaggerated; there is no unnatural fire and feeling, but an air of accustomed dignity and thought, while the technique has all the perfection of the painter's prime.
In 1516 Giovanni was buried in the Church of SS. Giovanni and Paolo, by the side of his brother Gentile. To the last he was popular and famous, overwhelmed with attentions from the most distinguished personages of the city. Though he had begun life when art showed such a different aspect, he was by nature so imbued with that temperament, which at the time of his death was beginning to a.s.sert itself in the younger school, that he was able to a.s.similate a really astonis.h.i.+ng share of the new manner. He is guided by feeling more than by intellect. All the time he is working out problems, he is dominated by the emotion of his subject, but his emotion, his pathos, are invariably tempered and restrained by the calm moderation of the quattrocento. The golden mean still has command of Bellini, and never allows his feelings, however poignant, to degenerate into sentimentality or violence.
PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS
Bergamo. Lochis: Madonna (E.).
Morelli: Two Madonnas.
Berlin. Pieta (L.); Dead Christ.
Florence. Uffizi: Allegory; The Souls in Paradise (L.).
London. Portrait of Doge (L.); Madonna (L.); Agony in Garden (E.); Salvator Mundi (E.).
Milan. Brera: Pieta (E.); Madonna; Madonna, 1510.
Mond Collection. Dead Christ; Madonna (E.).
Murano. S. Pietro: Madonna with Saints and Doge Barbarigo, 1488.
Naples. Sala Grande: Transfiguration.
Pesaro. S. Francesco: Altarpiece.
Rimini. Dead Christ (E.).
Venice. Academy: Three Madonnas; Five small allegorical paintings (L.); Madonna with SS. Catherine and Magdalene; Madonna with SS. Paul and George; Madonna with five Saints.
Museo Correr: Crucifixion (E.); Transfiguration (E.); Dead Christ; Dead Christ with Angels.
Palazzo Ducale, Sala di Tre: Pieta (E.).
Frari: Triptych; Madonna and Saints, 1488.
S. Giovanni Crisostomo: S. Chrysostom with SS. Jerome and Augustine, 1513.
S. Maria dell' Orto: Madonna (E.).
S. Zaccaria: Madonna and Saints, 1505.
Vicenza. S. Corona: Baptism, 1510.
CHAPTER XIII
CIMA DA CONEGLIANO AND OTHER FOLLOWERS OF BELLINI
The rising tide of feeling, the growing sense of the joy of life and the apprehension of pure beauty, which was strengthening in the people and leading up to the great period of Venetian art, flooded round Bellini and recognised its expression in him. He was more popular and had a larger following among the artists of his day than either Gentile or Carpaccio with their frankly mundane talent. Whatever Giovanni's State works may have been, his religious paintings are the ones which are copied and adapted and studied by the younger band of artists, and this because of their beauty and notwithstanding their conventional subjects.
Gentile's pageant-pictures have still something cold and colourless, with a touch of the archaic, while Giovanni's religious altarpieces evince a new freedom of handling, a modern conception of beautiful women, a use of that colour which was soon to reign triumphant. As far as it went indeed, its triumph was already a.s.sured; as Giovanni advanced towards old age, it was no longer of any use for the young masters of the day to paint in any way save the one he had made popular, and one artist after another who had begun in the school of Alvise Vivarini ended as the disciple of Giovanni Bellini.
It was the habit of Bellini to trust much to his a.s.sistants, and as everything that went out of his workshop was signed by his name, even if it only represented the use of one of his designs, or a few words of advice, and was ”pa.s.sed” by the master, it is no wonder that European collections were flooded with works, among which only lately the names of Catena, Previtali, Pennacchi, Marco Belli, Bissolo, Basaiti, Rondinelli, and others begin to be disentangled.
Only one of his followers stands out as a strong and original master, not quite of the first cla.s.s, but developing his own individuality while he draws in much of what both Alvise and Bellini had to give. Cima da Conegliano, whose real name was Giovanni Battista, always signs himself _Coneglianensis_: the t.i.tle of Cima, ”the Rock,” by which he is now so widely known, having first been mentioned in the seventeenth century by Boschini, and perhaps given him by that writer himself. He was a son of the mountains, who, though he came early to Venice, and lived there most of his life, never loses something of their wild freshness, and to the end delights in bringing them into his backgrounds. He lived with his mother at Conegliano, the beautiful town of the Trevisan marches, until 1484, when he was twenty-five, and then came down to Vicenza, where he fell under the tuition of Bartolommeo Montagna, a Vicentine painter, who had been studying both with Alvise and Bellini. Cima's ”Madonna with Saints,” painted for the Church of St. Bartolommeo, Vicenza, in 1489, shows him still using the old method of tempera, in a careful, cold, painstaking style, yet already showing his own taste. The composition has something of Alvise, yet that something has been learned through the agency of Montagna, for the figures have the latter's severity and austere character and the colour is clearer and more crude than Alvise's. It is no light resemblance, and he must have been long with Montagna. In the type of the Christ in Montagna's Pieta at Monte Berico, in the fondness for airy porticoes, in the architecture and main features of his ”Madonna enthroned” in the Museo Civico at Vicenza, we see characteristics which Cima followed, though he interpreted them in his own way. He turns the heavy arches and domes that Alvise loved, into airy pergolas, decked with vines. He gives increasing importance to high skies and to atmospheric distances. When he got to Venice in 1492, he began to paint in oils, and undertook the panel of S. John Baptist with attendant saints, still in the Church of S. Madonna dell' Orto. The work of this is rather angular and tentative, but true and fresh, and he comes to his best soon after, in the ”Baptism” in S. Giovanni in Bragora, which Bellini, sixteen years later, paid him the compliment of copying. It was quite unusual to choose such a subject for the High Altar, and could only be justified by devotion to the Baptist, who was Cima's own name-saint as well as that of the Church. Cima is here at his very highest; the composition is not derived from any one else, but is all the conception of an ingenuous soul, full of intuition and insight.
The Christ is particularly fine and simple, unexaggerated in pose and type; the arm of the Baptist is too long, but the very fault serves to give him a refined, tentative look, which makes a sympathetic appeal.
The attendant angels look on with an air of sweet interest. The distant mountains, the undulating country, the little town of Conegliano, identified by the castle on its great rock, or _Cima_, are Arcadian in their sunny beauty. The clouds, as a critic has pointed out, are full of sun, not of rain. The landscape has not the sombre mystery of t.i.tian's, but is bright with the joyous delight of a lover of outdoor life. As Cima masters the new medium he becomes larger and simpler, and his forms lose much of their early angularity. A confraternity of his native town ordered the grand altarpiece which is still in the Cathedral there, and in this he shows his connection with Venice; the architecture is partly taken from St. Mark's, the lovely Madonna head recalls Bellini, and a group of Bellinesque angels play instruments at the foot of the throne.
Cima is, however, never merged in Bellini. He keeps his own clearly defined, angular type; his peculiar, twisted curls are not the curls of Bellini's saints, his treatment of surface is refined, enamel-like, perfectly finished, but it has nothing of the rich, broken treatment which Bellini's natural feeling for colour was beginning to dictate.