BELLINI

<p>GIOVANNI BELLINI</p><p> </p><p>By George Hay</p><p> </p><p> <P> Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516) is the author of some of the most exquisite of Renaissance paintings. He is in a sense the painter's painter who had a long career like his pupil Titian in painting. He influenced many artists among them Titian Giorgione Vecchio Sebastiano del Piombo and Albrecht Durer. His influences include Andreas Mantegna his father Jacopo Bellini Antonello and Donatello.</p><p> <P> Giovanni Bellini does everything in his paintings that Renaissance painters are supposed to do: he painted beautiful pictures devotional images of the Madonna Christ and several saints; he painted mythological scenes and scenes from history; he refined and defined Early Renaissance space bringing it into the High Renaissance; he inaugurated a new feeling for landscape; he remained true to the sacred and emotional aspects of painting to the end of his career; he developed the several formats of Renaissance painting - the small private devotional pictures the large public altarpieces a host of secular portraits and large-scale friezes. </p><p> <P> One might see Bellini as supremely a High Renaissance artist especially in his later altarpieces where his sense of space seems in tune with Titian or Raphael. Bellini's style is very sweet. His paintings are full of a love for painting and a love for his subjects. The ambiguities in his works do not arise from his intentions which are as with so many Renaissance painters to be as exalting as possible. So his Madonnas and saints are lovingly painted. </p><p> <P> There is an undeniable sensuality in Giovanni Bellini's art. Central to his art is his sensuality. It is the same with the art of Leonardo Caravaggio Titian Vermeer Rembrandt and Rubens. The sensuality of the paintings themselves as objects is crucial to their evaluation aesthetically. Bellini is a sensual painter - not simply in his treatment of eroticism or in the eroticism of his forms but also because he painted self-consciously erotic subjects. He painted female nudes: the Woman with a Mirror (in Vienna) in The Feast of the Gods (in Washington) and in the restollo of Truth (in Venice). </p><p> <P> Giovanni Bellini's sacred art is as erotic as his secular art as with many a painter. Indeed one might say that some of Bellini's Christian paintings are more erotic than his paintings of mythological or historical subjects. His Pietas for instance with that lovingly described dead nude Christ may be seen as more erotic than the Classical scenes. The eroticism of art depends a lot on the viewer's response. And on painterly surface and technique. </p><p> <P> Fully illustrated including contemporaries of Bellini with many new illustrations for this edition. 144pp. </p><p> <P> www.crmoon.com</p>