FATHER OF THE RENAISSANCE

• Published date: 18 March 2023

"I can think of no other artist who absorbed as much from others yet maintained his individuality," says Neville Rowley, the head of 14th- and 15th-century painting at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and co-curator of the exhibition. "He achieved this because he was born in the quattrocento, when Venice transitioned from Byzantine domination to becoming Italian."

Bellini trained in the atelier of his father Jacopo, whose recognisably Gothic paintings open the exhibition. Jacopo named Giovanni's older brother Gentile after his own teacher, Gentile da Fabriano, the master of International Gothic. Giovanni's early work is barely distinguishable from that of his father and brother.

Historians base their belief that Giovanni was born out of wedlock on two snippets of documentary evidence. When his sister Nicolosia married the Paduan painter Andrea Mantegna in 1453, Giovanni was not cited among family members. Nor was he mentioned in the testament of his stepmother, Anna Rinversi. She left Jacopo's precious sketchbooks to Gentile.

The identity of Giovanni's birth mother is unknown. Could her absence explain why the infant Christ as painted by Bellini often seeks to catch the Virgin's attention, while she looks away?

Bellini transformed the symbolic, cold icons of Byzantine and Gothic devotional art into the universal mothers and children of the Renaissance. More than half his oeuvre is comprised of paintings of the Virgin and infant Christ. These were very much in demand and hung in bedrooms for private devotions. Since they were not shown in public, Bellini reproduced the same image up to 15 times.

If Bellini sought affirmation, he certainly received it. The neglected son became the most famous in a family of illustrious painters, the official painter of La Serenissima. When Gentile died in 1507, Giovanni finally inherited their father's drawings. He would be buried alongside Gentile nine years later, in the Basilica San Zanipolo.

For a time, the paintings of Bellini and his brother-in-law Mantegna were so similar that their works were sometimes misattributed to the other. Mantegna was a stickler for perspective who admired Greco-Roman art and the Florentine sculptor Donatello.

Their influence is seen in Bellini's Saint Justine (1475, Museo Bagatti Balsecchi, Milan). Mantegna had executed a similar painting 20 years earlier. Bellini's Justine, like Mantegna's, is a tall, sculptural figure whose draped clothing appears carved in marble or cast in bronze. Both hold...