Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [59]
Giovanni Bellini drew with all the grace of his father, but brought his paintings up to a high finish that delighted all. He has sensitivity and delicacy, making his women seem the essence of tenderness. There are many charming touches, such as the boy instrumentalists seated at the foot of the Virgin’s throne in his San Giobbe Altarpiece (Accademia, Venice), a device imitated by many later artists. Indeed, they plundered all his ideas and tried, many unsuccessfully, to copy his virtuoso technique. He ran a huge studio with dozens of assistants, attracted by his fame from all over the region, and it is likely that masters as diverse as Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo and Lorenzo Lotto passed through his shop at an early stage in their careers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, he was widely regarded as the greatest living painter, known throughout Europe. Yet he continued to absorb new ideas and influences, including from the young Giorgione, from the next generation but one. Dürer, in Venice in 1506 when Bellini was in his late seventies, said he was painting as well as ever, “still the best.” Bellini has always been fervently admired by painters themselves and those with a passionate interest in art, like Ruskin, who declared his altarpiece in Santo Zaccaria and his triptych in the Venice Frari the two finest paintings in the world.
The rise of a mature school of painting in Venice was characteristic of the spread of the fine arts all over Italy during the fifteenth century. Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–92) worked on high-quality commissions in towns all over central Italy, such as Perugia and Arezzo, where his fresco cycle of The Legend of the True Cross constitutes his most considerable work. He illustrates the extraordinary lust for learning that the Renaissance bred and the upward progression of its artists—for his father was a tanner and his own first job was to paint the striped poles used to carry candles in religious processions. Yet he made himself a master mathematician and played a bigger role in reviving and spreading the use of Euclid than anyone else. Three of his innumerable learned treatises survive, including his De prospectiva pingendi, an exposition of the rules of perspective that demanded more mathematical knowledge than most painters have ever possessed. Perspective figured in his paintings sometimes to the exclusion of other, more central requirements and to the confusion of the public. Thus in his wonderfully light and radiant Flagellation in the Ducal Palace, Urbino, Christ and his assailants have been pushed backstage while three unrelated figures, who are not even watching the scourging, dominate the foreground. Piero was an eccentric. In his Baptism of Christ in the National Gallery, London, interest is as likely to center on the man taking his shirt off, or the three shocked angels, as on the Baptist pouring Jordan water on Christ’s head. The Resurrection, in Piero’s hometown of Sansepolcro, is an amazing work, with Christ emerging somnambulistically from a marble sarcophagus against which the sleepers lie. There is about all Piero’s characterizations—saints, singers, onlookers, dignitaries—a certain