Volume 37, Number 12 · July 19, 1990
Rediscovering the Bellinis
By Charles Hope
The Genius of Jacopo Bellini: The Complete Paintings and Drawings
by Colin Eisler
Abrams, 560 pp., $195.00
Giovanni Bellini
by Rona Goffen
Yale University Press, 347 pp., $60.00
In Renaissance Italy art was often a family business, and no family of painters was more successful than the Bellini. Jacopo Bellini, who was born about 1400, was the foremost painter in Venice in the decades around 1450. His sons Gentile and Giovanni acquired an even greater reputation, as did his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna. Today the fame of Giovanni has overshadowed that of his brother and his father, partly because many more of his paintings are extant. But Jacopo too has retained a special place in the history of art, not so much on account of his pictures, most of which seem rather derivative, but because he left two books of drawings, one now in the Louvre and the other in the British Museum, which are quite unlike any other surviving works of art from the fifteenth century.
Review, 5386 words
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