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Life |
Early career |
Giovanni Bellini was born in Venice. The painter Jacopo Bellini had long been considered Giovanni's father, but the art historian Daniel Wallace Maze has advanced the theory that in fact, Jacopo was his much elder brother. Nonetheless, Giovanni was brought up in Jacopo's house. He always lived and worked in the closest... |
In a changed and more personal manner, he drew Dead Christ paintings (in these days one of the master's most frequent themes e.g. Dead Christ Supported by the Madonna and St. John, or Pietà), with less harshness of contour, a broader treatment of forms and draperies and less force of religious feeling. Giovanni's early... |
In 1470 Giovanni received his first appointment to work along with his elder brother, Gentile, and other artists in the Scuola di San Marco, where among other subjects he was commissioned to paint a Deluge with Noah's Ark. None of the master's works of this kind, whether painted for the various schools or confraterniti... |
Maturity |
To the decade following 1470 must probably be assigned the Transfiguration now in the Capodimonte Museum of Naples, repeating with greatly ripened powers and in a much serener spirit the subject of his early effort at Venice. |
Also likely from this period is the great altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin at Pesaro, which would seem to be his earliest effort in a form of art previously almost monopolized in Venice by the rival school of the Vivarini. |
As is the case with a number of his brother, Gentile's public works of the period, many of Giovanni's great public works are now lost. The still more famous altarpiece painted in tempera for a chapel in the church of S. Giovanni e Paolo, where it perished along with Titian's Peter Martyr and Tintoretto's Crucifixion in... |
After 1479–1480 much of Giovanni's time and energy must also have been taken up by his duties as conservator of the paintings in the great hall of the Doge's Palace. The importance of this commission can be measured by the payment Giovanni received: he was awarded, first the reversion of a broker's place in the Fondaco... |
Of the other, the religious class of his work, including both altarpieces with many figures and simple Madonnas, a considerable number have been preserved. They show him gradually throwing off the last restraints of the Quattrocento manner; gradually acquiring a complete mastery of the new oil medium introduced in Veni... |
High Renaissance |
An interval of some years, no doubt chiefly occupied with work in the Hall of the Great Council, seems to separate the San Giobbe Altarpiece, and that of the church of San Zaccaria at Venice. Formally, the works are very similar, so a comparison between them serves to illustrate the shift in Bellini's work over the las... |
In the later work, Bellini depicts the Virgin surrounded by (from left): St. Peter holding his keys and the Book of Wisdom; the virginal St. Catherine and St. Lucy closest to the Virgin, each holding a martyr's palm and her implement of torture (Catherine a breaking wheel, and Lucy a dish with her eyes); St. Jerome, wi... |
Stylistically, the lighting in the San Zaccaria piece has become so soft and diffuse that it makes that in the San Giobbe appear almost raking in contrast. Giovanni's use of the oil medium had matured, and the holy figures seem to be swathed in a still, rarefied air. The San Zaccaria is considered perhaps the most beau... |
Other late altarpieces with saints include that of the church of San Francesco della Vigna at Venice, 1507; that of La Corona at Vicenza, a Baptism of Christ in a landscape, 1510; and that of San Giovanni Crisostomo at Venice of 1513. |
Of Giovanni's activity in the interval between the altarpieces of San Giobbe and San Zaccaria, there are a few minor works left, although the great mass of his output perished with the fire of the Doge's Palace in 1577. The last ten or twelve years of the master's life saw him besieged with more commissions than he cou... |
In 1505 she endeavoured through Cardinal Bembo to obtain from him another painting, this time of a secular or mythological character. What the subject of this piece was, or whether it was delivered, we do not know. |
Albrecht Dürer, visiting Venice for a second time in 1506, describes Giovanni Bellini as still the best painter in the city, and as full of all courtesy and generosity toward foreign brethren of the brush. |
In 1507 Bellini's brother Gentile died, and Giovanni completed the painting of the Preaching of St. Mark which his brother had left unfinished; a task on the fulfilment of which the bequest by the elder brother to the younger of Jacopo's sketch-book had been made conditional. |
In 1513 Giovanni's position as sole master (since the death of Gentile and of Alvise Vivarini) in charge of the paintings in the Hall of the Great Council was threatened by one of his former pupils. Young Titian desired a share of the same undertaking, to be paid for on the same terms. Titian's application was granted,... |
Bellini died on 29 November 1516 (a date is given by Marin Sanudo on his diary). He was interred in the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo, a traditional burial place of the doges. |
Assessment |
Both in the artistic and worldly sense, the career of Bellini was, on the whole, very prosperous. His long career began with Quattrocento styles, but matured into the progressive post-Giorgione Renaissance styles. He lived to see his own school far outshine that of his rivals, the Vivarini of Murano; he embodied, with ... |
Bellini was essential to the development of the Italian Renaissance for his incorporation of aesthetics from Northern Europe. Significantly influenced by Antonello da Messina and contemporary trends such as oil painting, Bellini introduced the pala, or single-panel altarpieces, to Venetian society with his work Coronat... |
In 1822, German artist and composer Therese Emilie Henriette Winkel copied Bellini's work Christ Blessing for an altarpiece for the Brockwitz church in Dresden, Germany, which is still preserved today. |
Spanish Museums own a scarce, but high-quality, presence of his works. The Prado Museum owns a Virgin and child between two Saints, with the collaboration of the workshop. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum preserves a Nunc Dimittis, and The Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando holds a Saviour. |
References |
Further reading |
Roger Fry, Giovanni Bellini (At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1899; Ursus Press, 1995). |
Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (Yale University Press, 1989). |
Ronda Kasl, ed., Giovanni Bellini and the Art of Devotion (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2004) |
Oskar Batschmann, Giovanni Bellini (London, Reaktion Books, 2008). |
Antonio Mazzotta, Giovanni Bellini's Dudley Madonna (Paul Holberton publishing, 2012) |
Carolyn C. Wilson (ed.), Examining Giovanni Bellini: An Art "More Human and More Divine" (Brepols, 2015). (ISBN 978-2-503-53570-8)[1] |
Giorgio Vasari, Carlo Ridolfi, Marco Boschini, Isabella d'Este, Lives of Giovanni Bellini, Frank Dabell, trans., Davide Gasparotto, ed. (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2018) |
Peter Humfrey, Giovanni Bellini: An Introduction (Marsilio Editori, 2021). (ISBN 978-8829709434) |
External links |
Giovanni Bellini biography, style and critical reception |
Giovanni Bellini in "A World History of Art" |
The National Gallery |
Web Gallery of Art |
Biblical art by Bellini |
National Gallery of Art |
Masters in Art online |
Carl Brandon Strehlke, "Virgin and Child by Giovanni Bellini (cat. 165)" in The John G. Johnson Collection: A History and Selected Works, a Philadelphia Museum of Art free digital publication. |
Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (baptized 23 March 1609 – 5 May 1664) was an Italian Baroque painter, printmaker and draftsman, of the Genoese school. He is best known now for his etchings, and as the inventor of the printmaking technique of monotyping. He was known as Il Grechetto in Italy and in France as Le Benédette... |
He painted portraits, history paintings and landscapes, but came to specialize in rural scenes with more animals than human figures. Noah's ark and the animals entering the Ark was a favourite subject of his, and he devised a number of other new subjects from the early parts of the Old Testament with the patriarchs and... |
Biography |
Castiglione was born in Genoa. The biographer of Genoese painters, Raffaele Soprani says his parents had him placed in the studio of Giovanni Battista Paggi. Wittkower describes him as a "passionate student" of Anthony van Dyck, who arrived in 1621, and Peter Paul Rubens, who stayed in the city in the first decade of t... |
He had various brushes with the law in his lifetime. The Queen's Gallery in London, where an exhibition of his work was held in 2013, made the following statement: "Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione was also a violent and impetuous man, who was repeatedly in court for assault, allegedly attempted to throw his sister off a... |
The turbulence that characterised his life overshadowed his artistic brilliance, and Castiglione struggled to achieve recognition in his lifetime. Much of what is known about the artist is derived not from fulfilled commissions, but from court documents." |
Works |
Castiglione was a brilliant draftsman and pioneered the development of the oil sketch (often using a mixture of mediums) as a finished work - previously they had been used only for working studies for another finished piece, for example by Rubens. He returned to the same subjects over and over again, as both paintings ... |
He also executed some sixty etchings, arguably the most famous of which is The Genius of Castiglione, published by Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi in 1648. Diogenes searching for a Man is another of the principal of these; others are about religious themes. Some are moralistic stories such as that of the blind leading the bl... |
In about 1648 he invented the monotype, the only printmaking technique to be an Italian invention, making over twenty over the succeeding years. His most popular and influential prints were a series of exotic heads, mostly of vaguely Oriental males, but also of women. These were produced in great numbers. Among the sub... |
Castiglione was famous for his ability to paint animals, mostly farm animals, and they were often a dominant motif in his paintings. For example, in the painting of Jesus clearing the temple of Moneylenders, the religious event is a minor, background part of the painting, the stampede of animals is far more prominent t... |
In Mantua, he received his name of Grechetto, from the classic air of his pastoral depictions. In his later years, he was severely afflicted by gout. His brother Salvatore and his son Francesco excelled in the same subjects; and it is thought that many paintings which are ascribed to Benedetto are only copies after him... |
His paintings are to be found in Rome, Venice, Naples, Florence, and more especially Genoa and Mantua. The Presepio (Nativity of Jesus) for the church of San Luca, Genoa, ranks among his most celebrated paintings, and the Louvre contains eight characteristic examples. He painted a SS. Mary Magdalene and Catharine for t... |
Gallery |
Notes |
Sources |
Standring, Timothy J.; Clayton, Martin (2013). Castiglione: Lost Genius (PDF). London: Royal Collection Trust. ISBN 978-1-905686-77-3. |
Wittkower, Rudolf (1993). Pelican History of Art, Art and Architecture Italy, 1600-1750. Penguin Books. pp. 353–355. |
Jeutter, E. (2004). Zur Problematik der Rembrandt-Rezeption im Werk des Genuesen Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (Genua 1609-1664 Mantua): eine Untersuchung zu seinem Stil und seinen Nachwirkungen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (in German). VDG. ISBN 978-3-89739-466-7. Retrieved 2017-08-04. |
Soprani, Raffaele; Ratti, Carlo Giuseppe (1768). Vite de' pittori, scultori ed architetti genovesi. Italica gens (in Italian). Forni. pp. 308–315. Retrieved 2017-08-04. |
External links |
Gallery of etchings |
Genoa : drawings and prints, 1530-1800, fully digitized text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art libraries (see index) |
Giovanni Biliverti (surname also written as Bilivelt and Bilivert or other variants; 25 August 1585 – 16 July 1644) was an Italian painter of the late-Mannerism and early-Baroque period, active mainly in his adoptive city of Florence, as well as Rome. |
Life and work |
He was born in Maastricht. His father, Jacques Bylivelt (born Jacob Janszoon Bijlevelt; also known as Giacomo Giovanni Biliverti), was a painter and goldsmith from Delft, who went to Florence, where he worked for Ferdinando I de' Medici. |
Biliverti began as an apprentice in the workshops of Alessandro Casolani, in Siena. After his father's death in 1603, he worked in the studios of Lodovico Cardi (known as "Cigoli"), in Rome, from 1604 until 1607. During that time, they worked on commissions from Pope Clement VIII. In 1609, he joined the Accademia delle... |
In 1611, he created his first independent work, a martyrdom of Saint Callistus for the Benedictines. He was employed by Cosimo II de' Medici from 1611 until 1621, as a designer for the inlay technique known as "pietra dura". |
His Grateful Tobias and Chastity of Joseph (c. 1618) may be found in the Palatine Gallery of the Palazzo Pitti. In 1621, he painted a portrayal of Saint Helena discovering the Holy Cross, for the Basilica of Santa Croce. His Hagar in the Desert is displayed in the Hermitage Museum. His Christ and the Samaritan Woman is... |
Late in life, he became blind. He died in Florence in 1644. His students included Cecco Bravo, Agostino Melissi, Baccio del Bianco, Giovanni Maria Morandi and Orazio Fidani. |
References |
Bryan, Michael (1886). Robert Edmund Graves (ed.). Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical. Vol. I: A-K. London: George Bell and Sons. p. 128. |
Further reading |
Hans Geisenheimer, "Biliverti, Giovanni (auch „Bilivelti“ und „Birivelti“, Giovanni-Antonio)", Thieme-Becker, Vol. 4, p. 28 |
Goffredo Hoogewerff: "Bilivert, Giovanni", In: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. 10, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1968 (Online @ Treccani). |
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