Giovanni Bellini
Venetian, 1430-1516 ca.
Virgin and Child, 1480-85 ca.
Tempera and oil on panel
24 1/2 x 18 1/4"
Glasgow Museums, Bequest of Mrs. John Graham Gilbert, 1877
575
COMMENTS
Giovanni Bellini is considered the father of Renaissance painting in Venice. For him and his busy workshop, devotional images of the Virgin and Child were mainstays. Between about 1460 and 1500 they painted countless half-length Madonnas, revolutionizing the image in the process. Rather than faithfully copy the look of the old Madonnas, Bellini attempted, in the words of one scholar, a “spiritual likeness.” Bellini’s works share with icons a sense of monumentality, isolation, and austerity—a grave spirituality. Above all, it is Bellini’s use of light that conveys the mood; luminosity evokes a numinous presence. His figures are radiant, his landscapes lit by a dawn glow; light fills the entire space of his compositions. Bellini was among the first to master the new techniques of oil painting, which made this brilliant color possible.
- Bellini’s Luminous Madonnas, Italian Renaissance Learning Resources, a collaboration between the National Gallery of Art and Grove Art Online.
http://italianrenaissanceresources.com/units/unit-1/essays/bellinis-luminous-madonnas/
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Bellini was the greatest artist in late 15th-century Venice. He was famous for his large church altarpieces, but many of his most beautiful, and memorable, works are small paintings like this one of the Virgin and Child made for private devotion. This painting was probably displayed in a bedroom.
Bellini’s originality is in large measure due to his mastery of the medium of oil paint. Painting with oil rather than tempera enabled him to model his figures with greater subtlety and softness than ever before. He took the idea of the Madonna and Child as both believably human and simultaneously divine to new heights. This Madonna is a beautiful young mother who tenderly balances her pudgy toddler. But this is no ordinary baby. He looks down at an unseen viewer with an expression of great solemnity and raises his hand in benediction.
The faux-marble ledge establishes a solid base for convincing us of the reality of the holy figures, but it also acts as a barrier, setting them apart from us.
- Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond, 2015