The following is a review of Roger Fry's, "Giovanni Bellini", a study first published in London in 1899. It was republished in New York in 1995 with an introduction by David Alan Brown of Washington's National Gallery. Cited pages are in parenthesis)
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| Giovanni Bellini: Agony in the Garden |
Giovanni Bellini’s “Agony in the Garden” represented a major
turning point in his career. In his classic 1899 study, "Giovanni Bellini" Roger Fry asserted that
the “Agony and the Garden” marked the transition from Bellini’s early “Paduan”
style to the “Venetian” style that would characterize the remainder of his long
career.
Although the Bellini family was Venetian, Giovanni’s early
work had been done in Padua as an assistant to his father, Jacopo, on their
work in a chapel in the Santo, the church dedicated to St. Anthony. Working in
the Santo at the same time was Squarcione, the famous teacher who was reputed
to have trained over 100 painters including Andrea Mantegna, who would
eventually marry into the Bellini family. Squarcione and his school were the
leading exponents of what Fry characterized as a distinct Paduan style.
For Fry the “Paduan style” involved a system of linear
design that was based on a complexity of outlined forms, and that utilized an
old Paduan tempera technique “in which light and shade were put on by small
hatched strokes with the point of the brush….” (35) Andrea Mantegna, who never
departed from the Paduan style, did a version of the “Agony in the Garden” at
about the same time as Giovanni, and Fry argued that the contrast between the
two was becoming evident.
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| Andrea Mantegna: Agony in the Garden |
Bellini, in fact, shows in his
version of the subject how little the Paduan mannerisms were really congenial
to him, for he does not carry their system of linear design consistently
throughout the whole picture. The broad unbroken spaces of the hill on which
Christ kneels, and of the distant valley, and the more flowing drapery of the
S. Peter, all break with the linear convention which he still adopts in the
figure of Christ, and to some extent in the hill to the right. (26)
In summary Fry stated that “Bellini shows already that
perception of the emotional value of passing effects of atmosphere, which is
often supposed to be a peculiarity of the art of this century…he has broken
with literal accuracy…”(27)
The change in Bellini’s technique also represented a change
in substance and feeling that even moved Giovanni away from his father’s own
style. It involved a religious transformation influenced by the preaching of the
famed Bernardino of Siena.
The outward change, at all events,
from the mundane art of Jacopo’s sketches, which often treated religious
subjects with surprising levity, is sufficiently striking. The reaction of
Giovanni’s generation was not only towards a new technique, it was a reaction
of feeling as well; a revulsion from the premature paganism which had sprung up
in the courts of Rimini and Ferrara….it may have received greater impetus from
the revivalist propaganda of S. Bernardino. In 1443…S. Bernardino preached the
Lenten course at Padua. It was the climax of a lifetime spent in itinerant
preaching. He had never before had such an amazing success; and his sermons,
preached in the open air, were attended not only by the whole of the
population, but by the magistrates representing the sovereign state of Venice,
the professors, lecturers, and students of the University. (28)
After his great success in Padua, Bernardino went on to
Venice where he received equal acclaim. Fry noted that “he counted among his
friends the Doge Foscari, the Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first patriarch
of Venice, and most of the leading senators and distinguished men of the
day.” In Fry’s opinion this visit
“may well have been a contributory cause of the more religious attitude to life
expressed by Giovanni’s generation.”
It certainly showed a marked influence on Giovanni Bellini
and his work. Fry saw the change in Bellini’s famous “Pieta” now in the Brera
in Milan.
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| Giovanni Bellini: Pieta |
For here at last Bellini has shaken
of the uncongenial intricacy of Paduan design; he has begun to find his own
personal scheme, in which form is defined rather by the opposition of broad,
scarcely modeled planes, than by multiplicity of contours. (31)
Bellini returned to Venice after 1460 and the following decade
marked a “climax” in his life.
At last truly himself, free from
all outside influence, he expresses with an intensity which never infringes on
the claims of pure beauty, the profoundest sentiment of Christianity, pity, and
love….at this period Bellini’s works are confined to two subjects—the Virgin
and Child, and the Pieta. (32)
The transition would become complete in 1472 with the
arrival of Antonello da Messina in Venice. Antonello brought a new technique
“which admitted of a perfect fusion of tones.”
This technique consisted in part in
the superposition of thin layers of opaque colour mixed with oils. From this
time onward, all the most advanced artists of Venice succeeded in obtaining
fusion, and dispensed with hatching, except in rare cases…(35-6)
By the 1480s Bellini had succeeded in the perfection of
“that treatment of form as enveloped in atmosphere,” that became one of “the
chief distinctions of cinquecento painting in Venice” and which led inexorably
to Giorgione. (41)
The group of pictures we have just
considered closed the second stage of Bellini’s artistic career. During this
period his aim was to obtain perfectly modulated transitions of tone within a
precise contour. In the S. Giobbe altarpiece…a new idea begins to be felt—the
conception of enveloping the forms in atmosphere by means of a subtle variation
of the quality of the limiting contours of the figures. (43)
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| S. Giobbe Altarpiece |
Reading Fry one is led to conclude that rather than a
revolutionary departure from Bellini’s work, the work of Giorgione was based on
the principles and technique that Giovanni Bellini had developed over his
lifetime. In Fry’s words Giovanni kept alive his father’s tradition that
involved “free composition” and “lyrical fancy,” a tradition “of which
Giorgione was so soon to find the highest possible expression.” (47)
In addition, recent studies have shown a close affinity
between the techniques used by Giovanni and Giorgione. Fry’s description of
Giovanni’s mature style could well apply to Giorgione.
For the atmospheric quality is
obtained here largely by the use of oil glazes upon a tempera ground; it is by
these that the shimmer of vibrating air is communicated to the whole, by these
that the contours, on which the design is still built, are broken down, so that
the eye is no longer arrested, as in earlier art, by the impassable barriers
they present. (48)
In the first decade of the sixteenth century, at the very
height of the Renaissance, Giovanni Bellini, the elderly master who had begun
his career in Padua half a century before, and Giorgione, the young master from
Castelfranco, were working in Venice. We cannot be sure of their relationship
but there certainly seems to have been a close affinity of style. Roger Fry
compared Giorgione’s Castelfranco altarpiece with Bellini’s S. Zaccaria altarpiece.
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| S. Zaccaria altarpiece |
Between this altarpiece, dated
1505, and those of the ninth decade of the previous century, Giorgione’s genius
had matured; and the revolution in art, which Bellini had so long prepared, was
proclaimed by his Castelfranco Madonna of 1504. In that work Bellini’s great
pupil had shown that the new command of atmospheric tone and rich chiaroscuro
were consistent with, and even demanded an entirely new simplification of
design, and a new feeling for large and spacious disposition of masses. (52)
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| Giorgione: Castelfranco Altarpiece |
Both paintings were done at about the same time but even
today it is hard to say who influenced whom. Both are sacred subjects where the
traditional “sacra conversazione” has been raised to a new level. ###
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