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He is called the father of Venetian painting, but his child only faintly resembles him, if at all. That curious change of which one is conscious at the National Gallery in passing from Rooms I and VI to Room VII, from Tuscany and Umbria to Venice, is due less to the Bellinis in Room VII than to any painter there.
From letters that he wrote to his brother Philip, as well as from many other sources, we know that the art collection belonging to the Duke of Mantua was very rich. It included works by the Bellinis, Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Tintoretto, Titian, Paoli Veronese, and various others whose names have faded away like their colors.
"I have brought you here," said he one morning, as they left their gondolas at the steps of the Academy, "for the special study of Carpaccio's and the Bellinis' works.
Especially the great banking house of the Fuggers had the most intimate relations with the queen-city of the Adriatic. Yet art of the two great German cities would doubtless appeal less to the Venetian who had arrived at the zenith of his development than it would and did to the Bellinis and their school at the beginning of the century.
Such was the enthusiastic exclamation of Rubens, as he contemplated those paintings which had brought him from Antwerp. How many gifted minds spoke to him from the noble works which were before him! The three Bellinis, the founders of the Venetian school; Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto.
Paul Veronese tried it, and so did the Bellinis Titian also. Then a century passed, as centuries do, and the glory of Venice drifted to Amsterdam commercially and artistically. Amsterdam painters used every design that the Venetians had, and some of their efforts were sorry attempts. In Sixteen Hundred Twenty, following Venetian precedent, dissection became a fad in Leyden and Amsterdam.
But I reserve the outline of Venetian painting until the Bellinis are normally reached. The two great pictures of this next room are Titian's "Assumption" and Tintoretto's "Miracle of S. Mark," reproduced opposite page 164, and this one. I need hardly say that it is the Titian which wins the rapture and the applause; but the other gives me personally more pleasure.
"Just look at the Pitts, the Adamses, the Walpoles, the Beechers, the Booths, the Bellinis, the Disraelis!" and here we begin to falter. And then the opposition takes it up and rattles off a list of great men whose sons were spendthrifts, gamblers, ne'er-do-wells and jackanapes. When Pitt the Younger made his first speech in the House of Commons, he struck thirteen.
There may not be anything as fine as the S. Zaccaria or Frari altar-pieces, or anything as exquisite as the Allegories in the Accademia and the Uffizi; but after that our collection is unexcelled in its examples. In this little precious room of the Accademia are thirteen Bellinis, each in its way a gem: enough to prove that variousness of which I spoke.
Pietro Longhi Hogarth Tiepolo A gambling wife Canaletto Guardi The Vivarini Boccaccini Venetian art and its beginnings The three Bellinis Giovanni Bellini A beautiful room Titian's "Presentation" The busy Evangelists A lovely ceiling. A number of small rooms which are mostly negligible now occur.
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