Bellini by George Hay — Read

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.