Giovanni Bellini: Life and works

GIOVANNI BELLINI. LIFE AND WORKS

Giovanni Bellini. If you were born in a family of famous artists whose relationships with cultural world are intense, your creativity maybe would be inhibited otherwise stimulated in order to do more.
Giovanni Bellini was born and grew up in a family that concerning incentives there weren’t comparison.
From his father Jacopo to his brother Gentile, to his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, you can’t say that inspirations lacked in Giovanni’s life, and he tried to assimilate the best from them.

Giovanni Bellini’s artistic career was long and successful.
He constantly updated his style, and absorbed the novelties, but without reneging his point of reference, which was also his starting point: the Venetian painting.
In this post I will retrace the life and the works of Giovanni Bellini.

Giovanni Bellini, L’Angelo annunciante (detail)

Jacopo, Giovanni Bellini’s father, was a famous painter who brought to Venice the Renaissance style, together with and in competition with Antonio Vivarini, whose history I’ve already told you.
In addition, Giovanni’s brother, Gentile Bellini, was the most important portrait painter of the Venetian aristocracy at that time.
But Giovanni was also Andrea Mantegna’s brother-in-law.
I talked a lot about him in my post about Mantua, the city in which this artist expressed himself completely.
READ ALSO: Free Museums in Mantua, among which you’ll find also Mantegna’s house, where the artist lived and died.

Giovanni Bellini died in 1516, and in 2016 the city of Venice will celebrate the 500^th anniversary of the death of Giovanni Bellini with a programme of a series of events including the exhibition of the painting “L’ebbrezza di Noè” (“The drunkenness of Noah”) which I saw and told you, which is considered to be the artistic will of the Master.
Bellini’s artistic production consisted mainly of paintings of religious theme, and was open to a lot of influences he assimilated in a personal way.
Who inspired Giovanni Bellini?

Andrea Mantegna, Antonello da Messina who stayed in Venice in 1475-1476, his pupils Titian and Giorgione, who were born almost 50 years after Bellini.
Most of Giovanni Bellini’s paintings are still kept in Venice and a tour across the city will give you the chance to know in depth his works.

Works by Bellini

Thanks to all the people Giovanni met during his life, made him develop a deep awareness that the depicted space should be widened and humanized in comparison to the past.
Light entered his representations and made everything softer, and thanks to his stays in Romagna and in Marche, Giovanni brought great innovations in Venetian painting.
In comparison to his father Jacopo and his brother Gentile, Giovanni managed to surpass the Byzantine painting and understand the potentialities of the novelties of Renaissance, and especially of its protagonists.
Giovanni was already old when Leonardo Da Vinci and Albrecht Durer started taking their first steps, but he wanted to assimilate their inventions anyway, like only the great men can do: with curiosity and humility.

Here are the images of the most important works by Giovanni Bellini.