ART 235: Pre-Modern Art History

Hailed as the "savior" of Venetian painting by Jacob Burckhardt and declared by Albrecht Dürer to be the foremost painter of the city, Giovanni Bellini is a pivotal figure in the development of Italian Renaissance art. Renowned art historian Oskar Bätschmann charts the fraught trajectory of Bellini's career, highlighting the crucial works that established his far-reaching influence in the Renaissance. The artist struggled to break out of the long shadow cast by his accomplished father Jacopo and father-in-law Andrea Mantegna, and Bätschmann chronicles Bellini's development of distinct aesthetic and painting techniques that enabled him to set himself apart. Bellini also insisted on choosing his own subjects and themes, independent of the preferences of his patron Isabella d'Este, and thus set new standards for the role of the artist.

This Companion volume brings together commissioned essays by an international team of scholars on Giovanni Bellini, the dominant painter of Early Renaissance Venice. Among the topics and themes to be discussed are Bellini's position in the social and professional life of early modern Venice; his artistic relationships with his brother-in-law Mantegna, with Flemish painting, and with the 'modern style' that emerged in Italy around 1500; and the connections between Bellini's paintings and the sister arts of architecture and sculpture.

The Accademia Carrara of Bergamo is one of Italy's premier paintings galleries but remains too little known outside the country. The temporary closure and restoriation of its galleries, housed in a grand neoclassical building in the North Italian city of Bergamo, has made possible a welcome collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bringing to New York fifteen of the Carrara's masterpieces by Venetian and North Italian painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including Giovanni Bellini's haunting Pietà with the Virgin and Saint John, the predella panels from Lorenzo Lotto's celebrated Martinengo Altarpiece, and Orpheus and Eurydice, an ambitious composition fromTitian's early career. The exhibition and accompanyting publication illuminate not only the quality of the Accademia Carrara's holdings but also the unique position the museum occupies in the history of art, collecting, and connoisseurship in the northern Italian regions of Lombardy and the Veneto. As the custodian of three superlative, formerly private collections--those of the Bergamo native Count Giacomo Carrara (1714-1796), who founded the institution in the late eighteenth century, Guglielmo Lochis (1789-1859), and the great connoisseur Giovanni Morelli (1826-1891)--the Accademia Carrara has served to transform the collecting practices and artistic pursuits of three individuals into a reflection of the cultural history of Bergamo, a civic-minded vision whose influence extends far beyond the city's borders.

An innovative study of the relationship between Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, two masters of the Italian Renaissance  Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506) and Giovanni Bellini (active c. 1459; died 1516) each produced groundbreaking paintings, marked by pictorial and technical innovations, that are among the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Exploring the fruitful dynamic between Mantegna's inventive compositional approach and interest in classical antiquity and Bellini's passion for landscape painting, this fascinating volume examines how these two artists, who were also brothers-in-law, influenced and responded to each other's work.   Full of new insights and captivating juxtapositions--including comparisons of each of the artist's depictions of the Agony in the Garden and the Presentation to the Temple--this study reveals that neither Mantegna's nor Bellini's achievements can be fully understood in isolation and that their continuous creative exchanges shaped the work of both.