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Updated: May 16, 2025
Their faces are full of sweet earnestness, not of the ascetic sort, but joyful, with a calm, tranquil gladness. This description applies almost equally well to a half-dozen or more of Bellini's Madonnas, in various styles of composition. For the sake of definiteness, we may specify the Madonna between St. Paul and St. George in the Venice Academy.
His father and teacher was Jacopo Bellini, who had a school of painting in Padua and was the rival in that city of Squarcione, a scientific instructor who depended largely on casts from the antique to point his lessons. Squarcione's most famous pupil was Andrea Mantegna, who subsequently married Giovanni Bellini's sister and alienated his master.
And Raphael never painted them until he had seen Fra Bartolommeo's work. "But now look at Bellini's Madonna" as he turned again to the picture, "for she is as individual as Botticelli's, and is as easily recognizable. Everything else, however, is in perfect keeping from the general attitude and lifted hand to the half-drooping eyelids. Of what is she so proud?
Bellini's early works, for he composed three before he was twenty, so pleased Barbaja, the manager of the San Carlo and La Scala, that he intrusted the youth with the libretto of "Il Pirata," to be composed for representation at Florence.
It is these two tombs which draw most visitors to the Frari; but there are two pictures here that are a more precious artistic possession. Of these let us look first at Bellini's altar-piece in the Sacristy. This work represents the Madonna enthroned, about her being saints and the little angelic musicians of whom Bellini was so fond.
The greater part of these days was spent in visiting the chief sights of the place the great Dominican and Franciscan churches, S. Zanipolo with the tombs of the doges and the Gothic shrine of S. Maria Gloriosa with Giovanni Bellini's newly painted Madonnas in all their radiant loveliness, the graceful Renaissance buildings of S. Maria dei Miracoli and the Scuola di S. Marco, which the Lombardi had lately finished.
The boy got on speaking terms with the great painter, and ran errands back and forth from his studio. When twelve years of age we find him duly installed as a helper at Gian Bellini's studio, with an easel and box of paints all his own.
Foolish as the libretto is, the bitterest opponent of Italian cantilena could scarcely refuse to acknowledge the pathetic beauty of many of the songs. It is a matter for regret, as well as for some surprise, that Bellini's works should now be entirely banished from the Covent Garden repertory, while so many inferior operas are still retained.
There is daybreak again a fresh tone of reveille in the prelude to 'I Puritani. If Bellini's genius was not versatile in its means of expression, if it had not gathered all the appliances by which science fertilizes Nature, it beyond all doubt included appreciation of truth, no less than instinct for beauty."
It is there that he obtained the commission for two famous works, the Worship of Venus and the Bacchanal, designed, in continuation of the series commenced with Bellini's Feast of the Gods, to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso's castle of Ferrara; the series being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of the whole set, the Bacchus and Ariadne of the National Gallery.
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