_Giovanni Bellini_ (Venetian: 1426-1516). _See 189._
An early work of the master, painted probably about 1459 (nearly half
a century earlier than the Doge's portrait, 189), but interesting as
showing the advance made by him in landscape. "We see for the first
time an attempt to render a particular effect of light, the first
twilight picture with clouds rosy with the lingering gleams of sunset,
and light shining from the sky on hill and town--the first in which
a head is seen in shadow against a brilliant sky" (Monkhouse: _The
Italian Pre-Raphaelites_, p. 73). "In the figures of the Apostles,
especially in the one on the left, the repose of sleep is expressed in
so admirable and convincing a manner, that it would be difficult to
name a second painter of the _quattro-cento_ who could compare with
Bellini in this respect" (Richter). Nor is the advance one in the
technique of art only. The picture is one of the earliest in which art
made use of what Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy"--in which, that
is, art represents nature as sympathising with human emotion. Bellini
"called in nature," says Mr. Hodgson, R.A. (_Magazine of Art_, 1886,
p 215), "to sympathise with human sorrows, or rather he was the first
to point out that nature takes her colouring and her aspects from
the conditions of our passions and sentiments.[173] That sombre sky,
with its gleam along the horizon, that long dark hill, the wild plain
over which the traitor and his accomplices are stealing, have exactly
the aspect which they would present to one who stood there knowing
that a horrible treason was going to be perpetrated." Compare, for
this "pathetic fallacy" in painting, Titian's "Noli me tangere" (No.
270). Bellini's picture should be compared with Mantegna's of the same
subject in an adjoining room (1417). Mantegna seizes only the sublimity
of the idea of the Agony, Bellini's penetrating sympathy renders its
infinite pathos. Mantegna's picture is in some technical respects the
more accomplished; "but in all that concerns the imaginative conception
of the subject, in the harmonising of all the accessories to produce a
single profound impression on the emotions, above all in the large and
reposeful spaciousness of the composition, Bellini is surely the more
to be admired" (Roger Fry: _Giovanni Bellini_, p. 22). Both pictures
may be profitably compared with Correggio's of the same subject, in
which we are introduced to a new order of ideas (See notes on No. 76).