The book I am writing argues
According to my fellowship proposal, during June–September 2012 I was to begin writing my book. Every scholar knows that new ideas often occur in the process of writing, and I expected that to be the case, particularly as I had begun working on the project more than a decade ago. But I decided first to review the notes and bibliographic materials I had gathered and filed away over the years. As I sifted through these, culling, highlighting, and rearranging them, I began to realize that my present understanding of Bellini’s last works—and thus the concept for the book—were actually quite different from what I had proposed to CASVA a year earlier. For that reason I chose to reorganize my material and to refine the concept—a hypothesis that seeks to explain why Bellini painted his last pictures and
Members' Research Report Archive
Giovanni Bellini's Last Works
David Alan Brown, National Gallery of Art, Department of Italian Paintings
Ailsa Mellon Bruce National Gallery of Art Sabbatical Curatorial Fellow, June 1–September 30, 2012
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516) worked to the very end of a long career that left an indelible mark on Venetian painting. Bellini’s longevity and indefatigable devotion to his art created a problem for art historians, however, for he is one of those Quattrocento masters, like Pietro Perugino (c. 1446/1450–1523) or Luca Signorelli (c. 1445–1523), who remained active well into the period we call the High Renaissance. But while his colleagues became irrelevant, Bellini, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, continued to be creatively vital. Indeed, he flourished as never before. Giorgio Vasari and other early writers, nevertheless, failed to distinguish Bellini’s late work from the rest of his production. Focused on Titian as the quintessential “old age” artist, later scholars have also paid little attention to Bellini’s late works as a separate phase in his career. Such studies as there are treat everything he painted after the turn of the century as a whole and in approximation to Giorgione (c. 1477/1478–1510), who, according to Vasari, invented the “
Giovanni Bellini, Titian, The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.1
- Bellini, Giovanni
- Italian, 1430 - 1516
- Titian
- Italian, 1490 - 1576
- Giovanni Bellini and Titian
- The Feast of the Gods
- 1514/1529