Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [58]
Mantegna’s interest in landscape, and the fidelity with which he presented it, underlines his northern Italian origins. If Florentine art had a weakness, it was that it focused too exclusively on the human body. The architectural settings in which it placed the figures were props or exercises in perspective, rather than observed realities with their own intrinsic interest. The farther north one gets, the more the forests and mountains, valleys and rivers impinge, and the towns are real ones, minutely recorded, rather than abstractions.
Venice, though a powerful, rich and hyperactive city with a long tradition of artistic patronage, was, again, slow to acquire the Renaissance spirit. It had nothing like Florence’s apostolic succession of Cimabue, Giotto and Masaccio. But from the second quarter of the fifteenth century, it began to produce great paintings, thanks mainly to the brilliant Bellini family. Its patriarch, Jacopo Bellini (c. 1400–1470), married his daughter Nicolosia to Mantegna, and (though the son of a pewterer) was himself taught by Gentile da Fabriano—so we have here one of the most densely woven artistic networks of the period. Jacopo is known chiefly through his marvelous albums of drawings in the Louvre and the British Museum, but his son Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507) was a Venetian court painter of eminence who used the Venetian background to great effect in his work. His Miracle of the True Cross at San Lorenzo is a superb urban landscape, in which the buildings, painted in the most minute detail, tulip chimneys and all, are the chief characters. Indeed, as an artist of townscape, he was surpassed only by his pupil, the great Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460–1525), whose many identifiable Venetian backgrounds, including the marshes and lagoons as well as the city itself, make him one of the most fascinating realists of the entire Renaissance. Carpaccio was particularly ingenious at introducing dogs into his townscapes and interiors, as in his delightful painting of St. Augustine in his study, a beautifully observed depiction of the kind of room, with all its equipment, in which humanist scholars worked. Dogs also figure in his notable rendering of two Venetian ladies watching events from a balcony. Gentile Bellini, however, capped this by exotic touches, garnered during what seem to have been extensive travels in the eastern Mediterranean. In his giant painting St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria, not only camels but a giraffe figure, and there are touches of Arab architecture (plus a self-portrait wearing a gold chain presented to him by the sultan). His Procession of the True Cross in the Piazza San Marco shows the façade of the basilica, a major topographical work of art and a reminder that Canaletto sprang from a long Venetian tradition that was 250 years old when he was born.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516), Gentile’s brother, never traveled outside the Veneto during his long life—Vasari says he was ninety when he died—and seems to have had a passionate attachment to its scenery, which peeps out from behind and sometimes towers over the figures in his sacred altarpieces and other paintings. It is often a rustic landscape, with farmers working their fields and cattle browsing. It has echoes of Netherlandish work, going back to the Limbourg brothers of the early fifteenth century, whose Très riches heures du duc de Berry, the most sumptuous book of hours produced at the close of the Middle Ages, depicts all the agricultural seasons in turn. Though untraveled, Bellini lived in one of the busiest crossroads of Europe and was