Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters.
16 Facts About Giovanni Bellini
2.
Giovanni Bellini was raised in the household of Jacopo Bellini, formerly thought to have been his father, but now that familial generational relationship is questioned.
3.
Giovanni Bellini was considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it toward a more sensuous and colouristic style.
4.
The painter Jacopo Bellini had long been considered Giovanni's father, but the art historian Daniel Wallace Maze has advanced the theory that in fact, Jacopo was his much elder brother.
5.
Giovanni Bellini always lived and worked in the closest fraternal relation with his elder brother, Gentile.
6.
In 1470 Giovanni Bellini received his first appointment to work along with his elder brother, Gentile, and other artists in the Scuola di San Marco, where among other subjects he was commissioned to paint a Deluge with Noah's Ark.
7.
The importance of this commission can be measured by the payment Giovanni Bellini received: he was awarded, first the reversion of a broker's place in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and afterward, as a substitute, a fixed annual pension of eighty ducats.
8.
In 1514 Giovanni Bellini undertook to paint The Feast of the Gods for the duke Alfonso I of Ferrara.
9.
Giovanni Bellini was interred in the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo, a traditional burial place of the doges.
10.
Giovanni Bellini lived to see his own school far outshine that of his rivals, the Vivarini of Murano; he embodied, with growing and maturing power, all the devotional gravity and much of the worldly splendour of the Venice of his time; and he saw his influence propagated by a host of pupils, two of whom at least, Giorgione and Titian, equaled or even surpassed their master.
11.
Giovanni Bellini outlived Giorgione by five years; Titian, as we have seen, challenged him, claiming an equal place beside his teacher.
12.
Giovanni Bellini was essential to the development of the Italian Renaissance for his incorporation of aesthetics from Northern Europe.
13.
Significantly influenced by Antonello da Messina and contemporary trends such as oil painting, Giovanni Bellini introduced the pala, or single-panel altarpieces, to Venetian society with his work Coronation of the Virgin.
14.
Certain details in this piece, such as breaks in the modeling of figures and shadows, imply that Giovanni Bellini was still working to master the use of oil.
15.
Giovanni Bellini used the disguised symbolism integral to the Northern Renaissance.
16.
Giovanni Bellini was able to master the Antonello style of oil painting and surface texture, and to use this skill to create a refined and distinctly Venetian approach to painting.