The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

I’m glad that Charles Hope thinks I can “write perceptively and accurately” about style in Giovanni Bellini, but I take issue with other aspects of his review [“Rediscovering the Bellinis,” NYR, July 19]. As Mr. Hope himself admits, he has little sympathy for the contextual, cultural approach to art now taken by many leading American and European scholars, and exemplified in my book. Thus he suggests that nothing can be said about a painting unless specifically stated by its painter. But it is surely arguable that most painters never bothered to articulate the established beliefs and common-places of their time. It seems unnecessarily reductive, therefore, to argue, as Mr. Hope does, that the commonplace identification of the Christ Child with the Eucharist cannot be pertinent to Bellini’s work because the artist never wrote about it. The idea was so prevalent that Bellini could hardly have avoided it.

Mr. Hope’s positivism also makes him unduly restrictive about my treatment of Bellini’s early painting of St. Jerome. Because Voragine’s Golden Legend biography of the saint mentions all of the animals, including the lion, associated with Jerome, Mr. Hope considers that Voragine explains Bellini’s painting sufficiently and that the letter of St. Jerome that I quote is irrelevant. But it is not the animals that distinguish Bellini’s poetic vision of the saint from other works representing the same subject; it is the artist’s understanding of Jerome’s spiritual state, which the saint himself described best in the letter I quoted.

It is quite true that I unaccountably erred in specifying Chapter 24 of Ecclesiasticus as the text held by St. Benedict in the Frari altarpiece, despite my long acquaintance with the letters “M” and “O,” clearly painted by Bellini to identify the prologue and first chapter. Even so, the error does not disprove my main argument about the painting. Mr. Hope insists that the Frari triptych cannot be an altarpiece celebrating the Virgin’s immaculacy (her freedom from Original Sin). But the Frari is a Franciscan church, and the Franciscans were the great champions of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, for which Ecclesiasticus was a fundamental source. As a Franciscan church, furthermore, the Frari had no interest whatsoever in advertising the Benedictine Rule, to which Mr. Hope sees a reference. When St. Benedict wants to refer to his monastic rule in other images, he holds a copy of the text of the rule—and not Ecclesiasticus. In Bellini’s Franciscan setting, the relevance of this text to the friars’ faith in the Immaculate Conception is logical, and it is corroborated by other historical, art historical, and theological evidence.

Characteristically, Mr. Hope also discounts Ovidian elements in Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, dismissing the artist’s association with humanists because “the evidence points in the opposite direction.” What evidence is that? As my book makes clear, the artist had numerous connections among the humanists; Pietro Bembo, for example, was a friend and admirer.

Rona Goffen
Distinguished Professor of Art History
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey

To the Editors:

Charles Hope’s theory that the sketchbooks of Jacopo Bellini were a method of self-instruction for the middle-aged artist is not only thought-provoking but compelling.

Only one of Mr. Hope’s bases for this theory does not ring true: the supposed impermanency of leadpoint. He writes that because the medium is particularly susceptible to light, it is unlikely that the sketchbooks were intended as modelbooks for future generations of studio artists. Although Hope is right to be skeptical of the modelbook account of Bellini’s sketchbooks, it can’t be said that leadpoint is light-sensitive.

If this medium could be said to have an enemy, it would not be light but urban air, since acidity can cause corrosion of lead metal. However, even this occurrence is unlikely since a thin line of lead will not behave like a smooth deposit of the metal that is even several millimeters wide. The latter has a far more even expanse of surface area to be affected and reacts accordingly. Moreover, leadpoint is usually executed on a calcium ground which would somewhat mitigate any acidity caused by its environment. All in all, leadpoint is an admirably stable medium, as drawing media go.

It may be said in support of Mr. Hope’s larger argument that had the books been typical studio furniture and used like modelbooks, it is likely that they would not have come down to us in the relatively pristine condition in which we find them today.

Pia DeSantis Pell
Senior Paper Conservator
National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC To the Editors:

Charles Hope’s review of two books on Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini is marked by his usual “straightforward” approach to art history; it is also filled with enough errors of fact and judgment to warrant some clarification and comment.

Hope’s tendency to deny Renaissance artists any particular leadership in their culture (cf. his “real” Leonardo, whose views “now seem disappointingly prosaic” [NYR, August 17, 1989] ends by barring them entirely from participation in that culture—the old Giovanni Bellini being denied any serious contact with classical tradition. That tendency leads Hope to repeat the no longer tenable thesis that Titian sensualized Bellini’s otherwise chaste figures in the Feast of the Gods, transforming modest mortals into bawdy gods. This notion has been effectively ruled out by the recent restoration conducted by David Bull at the National Gallery of Art: “it was concluded,” Bull writes in his published report, “that the figures and their various accessories had all been painted by Bellini.” Hope’s forced effort to dissociate Bellini from “the scholarly values of the humanists” has led him seriously astray.

Hope’s limited understanding of the ways images function and carry meaning results in a peculiarly narrow view of iconography. With regard to the Immaculate Conception, he reveals a rather naive belief in a single, canonic image type for this doctrine and, apparently, an expectation of “explanatory inscriptions” on monumental altarpieces. His peculiarly tortured and self-contradicting argument regarding the Frari triptych concludes with the bald assertion that the Franciscan altarpiece “has nothing to do with the Immaculate Conception.” But Ecclesiasticus 1, the text held open by Benedict, begins with the declaration that “All wisdom comes from the Lord, and remains with him forever,” and it is precisely the equation of the Virgin with Divine Wisdom that traditionally provided the major textual base for the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculacy, her eternity. From a Mariological point of view, Ecclesiasticus sounds its basic theme, which will be refined in Chapter 24, from the outset. Timor Domini, the section about the fear of the Lord that Hope asserts makes the painted book a reference to the Benedictine rule, is revealed only incompletely in Bellini’s Bible and is clearly secondary to Origo sapientiae.

Still more perverse, especially coming from a student of Venetian art, is Hope’s treatment of the San Giobbe altarpiece and his denial of its particular Venetian resonance. Here, his literalism extends to visual allusion when he states that the painting “does not reproduce any part of San Marco” and can have no relationship, to the ducal basilica since “Saint Mark is not included among the saints.” He can hardly pretend that the veined marble revetment of the walls of Bellini’s painted apse and the golden mosaic half-dome above are commonplaces in Venetian church architecture. The combination of golden mosaics and dark mirrored marble slabs is particularly distinctive of San Marco itself. The marble is singled out for extensive description by Francesco Sansovino in his great guide to Venice of 1581, not only for the refinement of the workmanship but for the miraculous images that appear in the veined patterns of the stone, and he recalls that Albertus Magnus had thought them worthy of notice. In the altarpiece Bellini deliberately contrasts this rich Byzantine interior space with the Renaissance architectural detail of the supporting pilasters, which so famously relate to those of the actual frame of the altar in the church of San Giobbe, thereby distinguishing the higher sacred realm.

In the effort to maintain his rigidly positivist standards, Hope tries to dismantle a central tenet of the myth of Venice. Here again, an a priori stand—denying the link between religious art and political ideas, “more a product of the ingenuity of historians than of any solid contemporary evidence”—blinds him to the visual and monumental documents: “No one has shown, for example, that the Annunciation was any more common as a subject in Venice than elsewhere, and no one has produced a representation of this story with an inscription linking the theme to the foundation of the city.” Carried away by his own negative enthusiasm, Hope seems to have forgotten examples with which he is presumably familiar. Among the many public, and political, celebrations of the Annunciation we might cite: (1) the facade sculpture of San Marco itself; (2) Guariento’s fresco of Paradise above the ducal throne in the Great Council Hall of the Ducal Palace; (3) the Annunciation that takes place across the span of the Rialto Bridge; (4) Bonifazio de’ Pitati’s Annunciation triptych for the Camera degli Imprestidi of the Ducal Palace, where God the Father and the Holy Spirit soar above Piazza San Marco; (5) Giovanni Merlo’s monumental engraving of 1656, a panoramic view of Venice crowned by the Annunciation.

By such means, pictorial and allusive, Venice proclaimed its own divine sanction. According to the standard legend, Venice was founded on the date of the Annunciation, March 25th. Upon the ruins of the fallen, pagan empire of Rome a new republic was born in humility and in Christian liberty. March 25th thus initiated a new era of political as well as theological grace. These mythic associations found clearer articulation in the 15th century, especially in the encomiastic texts of humanists like Bernardo Giustiniani (De origine urbis Venetiarum), and still further diffusion in the vernacular panegyrics of the 16th, including Sansovino’s Venetia città nobilissima et singolare. The civic dimensions of the Annunciation were annually demonstrated on the feast day itself, when the triumphal procession of the doge and the signoria put the government and the very idea of Venice on public display. Hope’s search for “solid contemporary evidence” must have been perfunctory indeed.

Beyond the stubborn positivism of his stance, his professed faith in texts and documents—as though these records revealed some truth beyond the need of interpretation—Hope’s attitude represents an unfortunate hermeneutic model. Denying the possibilities of meaning in images, he would have us retreat from interpretive engagement and responsibility. Consistently evacuating pictures of meaning, he diminishes them and reduces the achievement of their makers to the narrow boundaries of his own imagination. Lacking any critical, let alone poetic, dimension, his brand of art history can only seem flat and prosaic; in his hands the art of the past becomes impoverished. Your readers—and art history—deserve better. David Rosand
Columbia University
New York City