CREMS Seminar - 'A Portrait of the Renaissance Venetian Artist as a Young Man: Jacopo Bellini and a Twenty-First-Century Approach to the Artist's Monograph.'

PLEASE NOTE LATER START TIME 

The Bellini are often recognized as the most important family of artists of Renaissance Venice. In the 1420s, Jacopo Bellini (c. 1394-1470/71) founded a workshop in the Venetian parish of San Geminiano and over the next several decades introduced in Venice the new Renaissance style that was emerging in artistic centers such as Florence and Padua. It has long been believed that Jacopo had two sons whom he trained as artists, the elder Gentile (d. 1507) and the younger Giovanni (d. 1516). Gentile specialized in portraiture and large-scale narrative paintings, in 1474 became the first official painter of the Venetian government, and a few years later was dispatched by the Venetian Senate to the Ottoman court of Sultan Mehmet II, whose portrait by Gentile, now in the National Gallery in London (1480), remains among the artist's most celebrated works. Giovanni Bellini, long considered one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, profoundly influenced Western European painting through his singular mastery of color and atmosphere, and by training Giorgione and Titian.

This talk, based on a chapter of my book-in-progress, "The Bellini Workshop," explores Jacopo's experience as the son of a tinsmith growing up in turn-of-the-fifteenth-century Venice and recounts for the first time the remarkable series of events that led to his establishing the Bellini workshop. This research, aspects of which I published in 2013 in Renaissance Quarterly, overturns a hundred years of scholarship on the Bellini family and has divided, sometimes bitterly, scholars of Venetian Renaissance art. I will discuss why this is so and also consider a number of related problems concerning Renaissance primary sources and their interpretation. Finally, I will present a new approach to writing the artist's monograph (or, in this case, the family workshop monograph), one that seeks to invigorate a genre many art historians consider old-fashioned or dead.