BELLINI

And if in our day Raphael must give way to Botticelli, with how

much greater reason should Titian in the heights of his art, with

all his earthly splendor and voluptuous glow, give place to the

lovely imagination of dear old Gian Bellini, the father of Venetian

Art?

--_Mrs. Oliphant, in "The Makers of Venice"_

[Illustration: Bellini]

It is a great thing to teach. I am never more complimented than when

some one addresses me as "teacher." To give yourself in a way that

will inspire others to think, to do, to become--what nobler

ambition! To be a good teacher demands a high degree of altruism,

for one must be willing to sink self, to die--as it were--that

others may live. There is something in it very much akin to

motherhood--a brooding quality. Every true mother realizes at times

that her children are only loaned to her--sent from God--and the

attributes of her body and mind are being used by some Power for a

Purpose. The thought tends to refine the heart of its dross,

obliterate pride and make her feel the sacredness of her office. All

good men everywhere recognize the holiness of motherhood--this

miracle by which the race survives.

There is a touch of pathos in the thought that while lovers live to

make themselves necessary to each other, the mother is working to

make herself unnecessary to her children. The true mother is

training her children to do without her. And the entire object of

teaching is to enable the scholar to do without his teacher.

Graduation should take place at the vanishing-point of the teacher.

Yes, the efficient teacher has in him much of this mother-quality.

Thoreau, you remember, said that genius is essentially feminine; if

he had teachers in mind his remark was certainly true. The men of

much motive power are not the best teachers--the arbitrary and

imperative type that would bend all minds to match its own may build

bridges, tunnel mountains, discover continents and capture cities,

but it can not teach. In the presence of such a towering personality

freedom dies, spontaneity droops, and thought slinks away into a

corner. The brooding quality, the patience that endures, and the

yearning of motherhood, are all absent. The man is a commander, not

a teacher; and there yet remains a grave doubt whether the warrior

and ruler have not used their influence more to make this world a

place of the skull than the abode of happiness and prosperity. The

orders to kill all the firstborn, and those over ten years of age,

were not given by teachers.

The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where there was only one

before.

Just here, before we pass on to other themes, seems a good place to

say that we live in a very stupid old world, round like an orange

and slightly flattened at the poles. The proof of this seemingly

pessimistic remark, made by a hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the

fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the

business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions

ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger

medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as

coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful lack of

everything but overwork.

I will never be quite willing to admit that this country is

enlightened until we cease the inane and parsimonious policy of

trying to drive all the really strong men and women out of the

teaching profession by putting them on the payroll at one-half the

rate, or less, than what the same brains and energy can command

elsewhere. In this year of our Lord, Nineteen Hundred Two, in a time

of peace, we have appropriated four hundred million dollars for war

and war-appliances, and this sum is just double the cost of the

entire public-school system in America. It is not the necessity of

economy that dictates our actions in this matter of education--we

simply are not enlightened.

But this thing can not always last--I look for the time when we

shall set apart the best and noblest men and women of earth for

teachers, and their compensation will be so adequate that they will

be free to give themselves for the benefit of the race, without

apprehension of a yawning almshouse. A liberal policy will be for

our own good, just as a matter of cold expediency; it will be

Enlightened Self-interest.

With the rise of the Bellinis, Venetian art ceased to be provincial,

blossoming out into national. Jacopo Bellini was a teacher--mild,

gentle, sympathetic, animated. His work reveals personality, but is

somewhat stiff and statuesque: sharp in outline like an antique

stained-glass window. This is because his art was descended from the

glassworkers; and he himself continued to make designs for the

glassworkers of Murano all his life. Considering the time in which

he lived he was a great painter, for he improved upon what had gone

before and prepared the way for those greater than he who were yet

to come. He called himself an experimenter, and around him clustered

a goodly group of young men who were treated by him more as comrades

than as students. They were all boys together--learners, with the

added dignity which an older head of the right sort can lend.

"Old Jacopo" they used to call him, and there was a touch of

affection in the term to which several of them have testified. All

of the pupils loved the old man, who wasn't so very old in years,

and certainly was not in heart. Among his pupils were his two sons,

Gentile and Gian, and they called him Old Jacopo, too. I rather like

this--it proves for one thing that the boys were not afraid of their

father. They surely did not run and hide when they heard him coming,

neither did they find it necessary to tell lies in order to defend

themselves. A severe parent is sure to have untruthful children, and

perhaps the best recipe for having noble children is to be a noble

parent.

It is well to be a companion to your children, and just where the

idea came in which developed into the English boarding-school

delusion, that children should be sent away among hirelings--

separated from their parents--in order to be educated, I do not

know. It surely was not complimentary to the parents. Old Jacopo

didn't try very hard to discipline his boys--he loved them, which is

better if you are forced to make choice. They worked together and

grew together. Before Gian and Gentile were eighteen they could

paint as well as their father. When they were twenty they excelled

him, and no one was more elated over it than Old Jacopo. They were

doing things he could never do: overcoming obstacles he could not

overcome--he clapped his hands in gladness, did this old teacher,

and shed tears of joy--his pupils were surpassing him! Gian and

Gentile would not admit this, but still they kept right on, each

vieing with the other. Vasari says that Gian was the better artist,

but Aldus refers to Gentile as "the undisputed master of painting in

all Venetia." Ruskin compromises by explaining that Gentile had the

broader and deeper nature, but that Gian was more feminine, more

poetic, nearer lyric, possessing a delicacy and insight that his

brother never acquired. These qualities better fitted him for a

teacher; and when Old Jacopo passed away, Gian drifted into his

place, for every man is gravitating straight to where he belongs.

The little workshop of one room now was enlarged: the bottega became

an atelier. There were groups of workrooms and studios, and a small

gallery that became the meeting-place for various literary and

artistic visitors at Venice. Ludovico Ariosto, greatest of Italian

poets, came here and wrote a sonnet to "Gian Bellini, sublime

artist, performer of great things, but best of all the loving

Teacher of Men."

Gian Bellini had two pupils whose name and fame are deathless:

Giorgione and Titian. There is a fine flavor of romance surrounds

Giorgione, the gentle, the refined, the beloved. His was a spirit

like unto that of Chopin or Shelley, and his death-dirge should have

been written by the one and set to music by the other--brothers

doloroso, sent into this rough world unprepared for its buffets,

passing away in manhood's morning. Yet all heard the song of the

skylark. Giorgione died broken-hearted, through his ladylove's

inconstancy. He was exactly the same age as Titian, and while he

lived surpassed that giant far, as the giant himself admitted. He

died aged thirty-three, the age at which a full dozen of the

greatest men of the world have died, and the age at which several

other very great men have been born again--which possibly is the

same thing. Titian lived to be a hundred, lacking six months, and

when past seventy used to give alms to a beggar-woman at a church-

door--the woman who had broken the heart of Giorgione. He also

painted her portrait--this in sad and subdued remembrance of the

days agone.

The Venetian School of Art has been divided by Ruskin into three

parts: the first begins with Jacopo Bellini, and this part might be

referred to as the budding period. The second is the flowering

period, and the palm is carried by Gian Bellini. The period of ripe

fruit--o'erripe fruit, touched by the tint of death--is represented

by four men: Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Paul Veronese. Beyond

these four, Venetian Art has never gone, and although four hundred

years have elapsed since they laughed and sang, enjoyed and worked,

all we can do is wonder and admire. We can imitate, but we can not

improve.

Gian Bellini lived to be ninety-two, working to the last, always a

learner, always a teacher. His best work was done after his

eightieth year. The cast-off shell of this great spirit was placed

in the tomb with that of his brother Gentile, who had passed out but

a few years before. Death did not divide them.

Giovanni Bellini was his name. Yet when people who loved beautiful

pictures spoke of "Gian," every one knew who was meant, but to those

who worked at art he was "The Master." He was two inches under six

feet in height, strong and muscular. In spite of his seventy summers

his carriage was erect and there was a jaunty suppleness about his

gait that made him seem much younger. In fact, no one would have

believed that he had lived over his threescore and ten, were it not

for the iron-gray hair that fluffed out all around under the close-

fitting black cap, and the bronzed complexion--sun-kissed by wind

and weather--which formed a trinity of opposites that made people

turn and stare.

Queer stories used to be told about him. He was a skilful gondolier,

and it was the daily row back and forth from the Lido that gave him

that face of bronze. Folks said he ate no meat and drank no wine,

and that his food was simply ripe figs in the season, with coarse

rye bread and nuts. Then there was that funny old hunchback, a

hundred years old at least, and stone-deaf, who took care of the

gondola, spending the whole day, waiting for his master, washing the

trim, graceful, blue-black boat, arranging the awning with the white

cords and tassels, and polishing the little brass lions at the

sides. People tried to question the old hunchback, but he gave no

secrets away. The master always stood up behind and rowed, while

down on the cushions rode the hunchback, the guest of honor.

There stood the master erect, plying the oar, his long black robe

tucked up under the dark blue sash that exactly matched the color of

the gondola. The man's motto might have been, "Ich Dien," or that

passage of Scripture, "He that is greatest among you shall be your

servant." Suspended around his neck by a slender chain was a bronze

medal, presented by vote of the Signoria when the great picture of

"The Transfiguration" was unveiled. If this medal had been a

crucifix, and you had met the wearer in San Marco, one glance at the

finely chiseled features, the black cap and the flowing robe and you

would have said at once the man was a priest, Vicar-General of some

important diocese. But seeing him standing erect on the stern of a

gondola, the wind caressing the dark gray hair, you would have been

perplexed until your gondolier explained in serious undertone that

you had just passed "The greatest Painter in all Venice, Gian, the

Master."

Then if you showed curiosity and wanted to know further, your

gondolier would have told you more about this strange man.

The canals of Venice are the highways, and the gondoliers are like

'bus-drivers in Piccadilly--they know everybody and are in close

touch with all the secrets of State. When you get to the Giudecca

and tie up for lunch, over a bottle of Chianti, your gondolier will

tell you this: The hunchback there in the gondola, rowed by the

Master, is the Devil, who has taken that form just to be with and

guard the greatest artist the world has ever seen. Yes, Signor, that

clean-faced man with his frank, wide-open, brown eyes is in league

with the Evil One. He is the man who took young Tiziano from Cadore

into his shop, right out of a glass-factory, and made him a great

artist, getting him commissions and introducing him everywhere! And

how about the divine Giorgione who called him father? Oho!

And who is Giorgione? The son of some unknown peasant woman. And if

Bellini wanted to adopt him, treat him as his son indeed, kissing

him on the cheek when he came back just from a day's visit to

Mestre, whose business was it? Oho!

Besides that, his name isn't Giorgione--it is Giorgio Barbarelli.

And didn't this Giorgio Barbarelli, and Tiziano from Cadore, and

Espero Carbonne, and that Gustavo from Nuremberg, and the others

paint most of Gian's pictures? Surely they did. The old man simply

washes in the backgrounds and the boys do the work. About all old

Gian does is to sign the picture, sell it and pocket the proceeds.

Carpaccio helps him, too--Carpaccio, who painted the loveliest

little angel sitting crosslegged playing the biggest mandolin you

ever saw in your life.

That is genius, you know--the ability to get some one else to do the

work, and then capture the ducats and the honors for yourself. Of

course Gian knows how to lure the boys on--something has to be done

in order to hold them. Gian buys a picture from them now and then;

his studio is full of their work--better than he can do. Oh, he

knows a good thing when he sees it. These pictures will be valuable

some day, and he gets them at his own price. It was Antonello of

Messina who introduced oil-painting into Venice. Before that they

mixed their paints with water, milk or wine. But when Antonello came

along with his dark, lustrous pictures, he set all artistic Venice

astir. Gian Bellini discovered the secret, they say, by feigning to

be a gentleman and going to the newcomer and sitting for his

picture. He it was who discovered that Antonello mixed his colors

with oil. Oho!

Of course not all of the pictures in his studio are painted by the

boys--some are painted by that old Dutchman what's-his-name--oh,

yes, Durer, Alberto Durer of Nuremberg. Two Nuremberg painters were

in that very gondola last week just where you sit--they are here in

Venice now, taking lessons from Gian, they said. Gian was up there

at Nuremberg and lived a month with Durer--they worked together,

drank beer together, I suppose, and caroused. Gian is very strict

about what he does in Venice, but you can never tell what a man will

do when he is away from home. The Germans are a roystering lot--but

they do say they can paint. Me? I have never been there--and do not

want to go, either--there are no canals there. To be sure, they

print books in Nuremberg. It was up there somewhere that they

invented type, a lazy scheme to do away with writing. They are a

thrifty lot--those Germans--they give me my fare and a penny more,

just a single penny, and no matter how much I have talked and

pointed out the wonderful sights, and imparted useful information,

known to me alone--only one penny extra--think of it!

Yes, printing was first done at Mayence by a German, Gutenberg,

about sixty years ago. One of Gutenberg's workmen went up to

Nuremberg and taught others how to design and cast type. This man

Alberto Durer helped them, designing the initials and making title-

pages by cutting the design on a wooden block, then covering this

block with ink, laying a sheet of paper upon it, and placing it in a

press; then when the paper is lifted off it looks exactly like the

original drawing. In fact, most people couldn't tell the difference,

and here you can print thousands of them from the one block!

Gian Bellini makes drawings for title-pages and initials for Aldus

and Nicholas Jenson. Venice is the greatest printing-place in the

world, and yet the business began here only thirty years ago. The

first book printed here was in Fourteen Hundred Sixty-nine, by John

of Speyer. There are nearly two hundred licensed printing-presses

here, and it takes usually four men to a press--two to set the type

and get things ready, and two to run the press. This does not count,

of course, the men who write the books, and those who make the type

and cut the blocks from which they print the pictures for

illustrations. At first, you know, the books they printed in Venice

had no title-pages, initials or illustrations. My father was a

printer and he remembers when the first large initials were printed

--before that, the spaces were left blank and the books were sent out

to the monasteries to be completed by hand.

Gian and Gentile had a good deal to do about cutting the first

blocks for initials--they got the idea, I think, from Nuremberg. And

now there are Dutchmen down here from Amsterdam learning how to

print books and paint pictures. Several of them are in Gian's

studio, I hear--every once in a while I get them for a trip to the

Lido or to Murano.

Gentile Bellini is his brother and looks very much like him. The

Grand Turk at Constantinople came here once and saw Gian Bellini at

work in the Great Hall. He had never seen a good picture before and

was amazed. He wanted the Senate to sell Gian to him, thinking he

was a slave. They humored the Pagan by hiring Gentile Bellini to go

instead, loaning him out for two years, so to speak.

Gentile went, and the Sultan, who never allowed any one to stand

before him, all having to grovel in the dirt, treated Gentile as an

equal. Gentile even taught the old rogue to draw a little, and they

say the painter had a key to every room in the palace, and was

treated like a prince.

Well, they got along all right, until one day Gentile drew the

picture of the head of John the Baptist on a charger.

"A man's head doesn't look like that when it is cut off," said the

Turk contemptuously. Gentile had forgotten that the Turk was on

familiar ground.

"Perhaps the Light of the Sun knows more about painting than I do!"

said Gentile, as he kept right on at his work.

"I may not know much about painting, but I'm no fool in some other

things I might name," was the reply. The Sultan clapped his hands

three times: two slaves appeared from opposite doors. One was a

little ahead of the other, and as this one approached, the Sultan

with a single swing of the snickersnee snipped off his head. This

teaches us that obedience to our superiors is its own reward. But

the lesson was wholly lost on Gentile Bellini, for he did not remain

even to examine the severed head for art's sake. The thought that it

might be his turn next was supreme, and he leaped through a window,

taking the sash with him. Making his way to the docks he found a

sailing-vessel loading with fruit, bound for Venice. A small purse

of gold made the matter easy--the captain of the boat secreted him,

and in four days he was safely back in Saint Mark's giving thanks to

God for his deliverance.

No, I didn't say Gian was a rogue--I only told you what others say.

I am only a poor gondolier--why should I trouble myself about what

great folks do? I simply tell you what I hear--it may be so, and it

may not; God knows! There is that Pascale Salvini. He has a rival

studio, and when that Genoese, Cristoforo Colombo, was here and made

his stopping-place at Bellini's studio, Pascale told every one that

Colombo was a lunatic and Bellini another, for encouraging him to

show his foolish maps and charts. Now, they do say that Colombo has

discovered a new world, and Italians are feeling troubled in

conscience because they did not fit him out with ships instead of

forcing him to go to Spain.

No, I didn't say Bellini was a hypocrite--Pascale's pupils say so,

and once they followed him over to Murano--three barca-loads and my

gondola besides. You see it was like this: Twice a week, just after

sundown, we used to see Gian Bellini untie his boat from the landing

there behind the Doge's palace, turn the prow, and beat out for

Murano, with no companion but that deaf old caretaker. Twice a week,

Tuesdays and Fridays--always at just the same hour, regardless of

weather--we would see the old hunchback light the lamps, and in a

few moments the Master would appear, tuck up his black robe, step

into the boat, take the oar, and away they would go. It was always

to Murano, and always to the same landing--one of our gondoliers had

followed several times, just out of curiosity.

Finally it came to the ears of Pascale that Gian took this regular

trip to Murano. "It is a rendezvous," said Pascale; "worse than

that, an orgy among those lacemakers and the rogues of the

glassworks. Oh, to think that Gian should stoop to such things at

his age--his pretended asceticism is but a mask--and at his age!"

The Pascale students took it up, and once came in collision with

that Tiziano of Cadore, who they say broke a boat-hook over the head

of one of them who had spoken ill of the Master.

But this did not silence the talk, and one dark night, when the air

was full of flying mist, one of Pascale's students came to me and

told me that he wanted me to take a party over to Murano. The

weather was so bad that I refused to go--the wind blew in gusts,

sheet-lightning filled the eastern sky, and all honest men, but poor

belated gondoliers, had hied them home.