[1] _reitres_, German soldiers of fortune.
BELLECOUR (1725-1778), French actor, whose real name was JEAN CLAUDE
GILLES COLSON, was born on the 16th of January 1725, the son of a
portrait-painter. He showed decided artistic talent, but soon deserted
the brush for the stage under the name of Bellecour. After playing in
the provinces he was called to the Comedie Francaise, but his _debut_,
on the 21st of December 1750, as Achilles in _Iphigenie_ was not a great
success. He soon turned to more congenial comedy roles, which for thirty
years he filled with great credit. He was a very natural player, and his
willingness to give others on the stage an opportunity to show their
talents made him extremely popular. He wrote a successful play, _Fausses
apparences_ (1761), and was very useful to the Comedie Francaise in
editing and adapting the plays of others. He died on the 19th of
November 1778.
His wife, ROSE PERRINE LE ROY DE LA CORBINAYE, was born at Lamballe on
the 20th of December 1730, the daughter of an artillery officer. Under
the stage name of Beaumenard she made her first Paris appearance in 1743
as Gogo in Favart's _Le Coq du village_. After a year at the Opera
Comique she played in several companies, including that of Marshal Saxe,
who is said to have been not insensible to her charms. In 1749 she made
her _debut_ at the Comedie Francaise as Dorine in _Tartuffe_, and her
success was immediate. She retired in 1756, but after an absence of five
years, during which she married, she reappeared as Madame Bellecour, and
continued her successes in soubrette parts in the plays of Moliere and
de Regnard. She retired finally at the age of sixty, but troublous times
had put an end to the pension which she received from Louis XVI. and
from the theatre, and she died in abject poverty on the 5th of August
1799. There is a charming portrait of her owned by the Theatre Francais.
BELLEFONTAINE, a city and the county-seat of Logan county, Ohio, U.S.A.,
about 45 m. N.W. of Columbus. Pop. (1890) 4245; (1900) 6649 (267
foreign-born); (1910) 8238. It is served by the Cleveland, Cincinnati,
Chicago & St Louis (which has large shops here) and the Ohio Central
railways; also by the Dayton, Springfield & Urbana electric railway. It
is built on the south-west slope of a hill having an elevation of about
1500 ft. above sea-level and at the foot of which are several springs of
clear water which suggested the city's name. Among the city's
manufactures are iron bridges, carriage-bodies, flour and cement. The
municipality owns and operates its water-works system and its gas and
electric-lighting plants. Bellefontaine was first settled about 1818,
was laid out as a town and made the county-seat in 1820 and was
incorporated in 1835.
BELLEGARDE, the name of an important French family. Roger de Saint-Lary,
baron of Bellegarde, served with distinction in the wars against the
French Protestants. He showed much devotion to Henry III., who loaded
him with favours and made him marshal of France. He eventually fell into
disgrace, however, and died by poisoning in 1579. His nephew, Roger de
Saint-Lary de Termes, a favourite with Henry III., Henry IV. and Louis
XIII., was royal master of the horse and governor of Burgundy. His
estate of Seurre in Burgundy was created a duchy in the peerage of
France (_duche-pairie_) in his favour under the name of Bellegarde, in
1619. In 1645 the title of this duchy was transferred to the estate of
Choisy-aux-Loges in Gatinais, and was borne later by the family of
Pardaillan de Gondrin, heirs of the house of Saint-Lary-Bellegarde. When
Seurre passed into the possession of the princes of Conde they in the
same way acquired the title of dukes of Bellegarde. (M. P.*)
BELLEGARDE, HEINRICH JOSEPH JOHANNES, COUNT VON (1756-1845), Austrian
soldier and statesman, was born at Dresden on the 29th of August 1756,
and for a short time served in the Saxon army. Transferring his services
to Austria in 1771 he distinguished himself greatly as colonel of
dragoons in the Turkish War of 1788-1789, and served as a major-general
in the Netherlands campaigns of 1793-1794. In the campaign of 1796 in
Germany, as a lieutenant field marshal, he served on the staff of the
archduke Charles, whom he accompanied to Italy in the following year. He
was also employed in the congress of Rastatt. In 1799 he commanded a
corps in eastern Switzerland, connecting the armies of the archduke and
Suvarov, and finally joined the latter in north Italy. He conducted the
siege of the citadel of Alessandria, and was present at the decisive
battle of Novi. He served again in the latter part of the Marengo
campaign of 1800 in the rank of general of cavalry. In 1805, when the
archduke Charles left to take command in Italy, Bellegarde became
president _ad interim_ of the council of war. He was, however, soon
employed in the field, and at the sanguinary battle of Caldiero he
commanded the Austrian right. In the war of 1809 he commanded the
extreme right wing of the main army (see NAPOLEONIC CAMPAIGNS). Cut off
from Charles as the result of the battle of Eckmuhl, he retreated into
Bohemia, but managed to rejoin before the great battles near Vienna
(Aspern and Wagram). From 1809 to 1813 Bellegarde, now field marshal,
was governor-general of Galicia, but was often called to preside over
the meetings of the Aulic Council, especially in 1810 in connexion with
the reorganization of the Austrian army. In 1813, 1814 and 1815 he led
the Austrian armies in Italy. His successes in these campaigns were
diplomatic as well as military, and he ended them by crushing the last
attempt of Murat in 1815. From 1816 to 1825 (when he had to retire owing
to failing eyesight) he held various distinguished civil and military
posts. He died in 1845.
See Smola, _Das Leben des F.M. van Bellegarde_ (Vienna, 1847).
BELLE-ILE-EN-MER, an island off the W. coast of France, forming a canton
of the department of Morbihan, 8 m. S. by W. of the peninsula of
Quiberon. Pop. (1906) 9703. Area, 33 sq. m. The island is divided into
the four communes of Le Palais, Bangor, Sauzon and Locmaria. It forms a
treeless plateau with an average height of 130 ft. above sea-level,
largely covered with moors and bordered by a rugged and broken coast.
The climate is mild, the fig-tree and myrtle growing in sheltered spots
and the soil, where cultivated, is productive. The inhabitants are
principally engaged in agriculture and the fisheries, and in the
preservation of sardines, anchovies, &c. The breed of draught horses in
the island is highly prized. The chief town, Le Palais (pop. 2637), has
an old citadel and fortifications, and possesses a port which is
accessible to vessels drawing 13 ft. of water. Belle-Ile must have been
inhabited from a very early period, as it possesses several stone
monuments of the class usually called Druidic.
The Roman name of the island seems to have been _Vindilis_, which in the
middle ages became corrupted to Guedel. In 1572 the monks of the abbey
of Ste Croix at Quimperle ceded the island to the Retz family, in whose
favour it was raised to a marquisate in the following year. It
subsequently came into the hands of the family of Fouquet, and was ceded
by the latter to the crown in 1718. It was held by English troops from
1761 to 1763 when the French got it in exchange for Nova Scotia. A few
of the inhabitants of the latter territory migrated to Belle-Ile, which
is partly peopled by their descendants. In the state prison of Nouvelle
Force at Le Palais political prisoners have at various times been
confined.
BELLE-ISLE, CHARLES LOUIS AUGUSTE FOUQUET, COMTE, and later DUC, DE
(1684-1761), French soldier and statesman, was the grandson of Nicholas
Fouquet, superintendent of finances under Louis XIV., and was born at
Villefranche de Rouergue. Although his family was in disgrace, he
entered the army at an early age and was made proprietary colonel of a
dragoon regiment in 1708. He rose during the War of the Spanish
Succession to the rank of brigadier, and in March 1718 to that of
_marechal de camp_. In the Spanish War of 1718-1719 he was present at
the capture of Fontarabia in 1718 and at that of St Sebastian in 1719.
When the duke of Bourbon became prime minister, Belle-Isle was
imprisoned in the Bastille, and then relegated to his estates, but with
the advent of Cardinal Fleury to power he regained some measure of
favour and was made a lieutenant-general. In the War of the Polish
Succession he commanded a corps under the orders of Marshal Berwick,
captured Trier and Trarbach and took part in the siege of Philippsburg
(1734). When peace was made in 1736 the king, in recognition both of his
military services and of the part he had taken in the negotiations for
the cession of Lorraine, gave him the government of the three important
fortresses of Metz, Toul and Verdun--an office which he kept till his
death. His military and political reputation was now at its height, and
he was one of the principal advisers of the government in military and
diplomatic affairs. In 1741 he was sent to Germany as French
plenipotentiary to carry out, in the interests of France, a grand scheme
of political reorganization in the moribund empire, and especially to
obtain the election of Charles, elector of Bavaria, as emperor. His
diplomacy was thus the mainspring of the War of the Austrian Succession
(q.v.), and his military command in south Germany was full of incidents
and vicissitudes. He had been named marshal of France in 1741, and
received a large army, with which it is said that he promised to make
peace in three months under the walls of Vienna. The truth of this story
is open to question, for no one knew better than Belle-Isle the
limitations imposed upon commanders by the military and political
circumstances of the times. These circumstances in fact rendered his
efforts, both as a general and as a statesman, unavailing, and the one
redeeming feature in the general failure was his heroic retreat from
Prague. In ten days he led 14,000 men into and across the Bohemian
Forest, suffering great privations and harassed by the enemy, but never
allowing himself to be cut off, and his subordinate Chevert defended
Prague so well that the Austrians were glad to allow him to rejoin his
chief. The campaign, however, had discredited Belle-Isle; he was
ridiculed at Paris by the wits and the populace, even Fleury is said to
have turned against him, and, to complete his misfortunes, he was taken
prisoner by the English in going from Cassel to Berlin through Hanover.
He remained a year in England, in spite of the demands of Louis XV. and
of the emperor Charles VII. During the campaign of 1746 he was in
command of the "Army of Piedmont" on the Alpine frontier, and although
he began his work with a demoralized and inferior army, he managed not
only to repel the invasion of the Spanish and Italian forces but also to
carry the war back into the plain of Lombardy. At the peace, having thus
retrieved his military reputation, he was created duke and peer of
France (1748). In 1757 his credit at court was considerable, and the
king named him secretary for war. During his three years' ministry he
undertook many reforms, such as the development of the military school
for officers, and the suppression of the proprietary colonelcies of
nobles who were too young to command; and he instituted the Order of
Merit. But the Seven Years' War was by that time in progress and his
efforts had no immediate effect. He died at Versailles on the 26th of
January 1761. Belle-Isle interested himself in literature; was elected a
member of the French Academy in 1740, and founded the Academy of Metz in
1760. The dukedom ended with his death, his only son having been killed
in 1758 at the battle of Crefeld.
His brother, LOUIS CHARLES ARMAND FOUQUET, known as the Chevalier de
Belle-Isle (1693-1746), was also a soldier and a diplomatist. He served
as a junior officer in the War of the Spanish Succession and as
brigadier in the campaign of 1734 on the Rhine and Moselle, where he won
the grade of _marechal de camp_. He was employed under his brother in
political missions in Bavaria and in Swabia in 1741-1742, became a
lieutenant-general, fought in Bohemia, Bavaria and the Rhine countries
in 1742-1743, and was arrested and sent to England with the marshal in
1744. On his release he was given a command in the Army of Piedmont. He
fell a victim to his romantic bravery at the action of Exilles (Col de
l'Assiette) on the 19th of July 1746.
See Jean de Maugre, _Oraison funebre du marechal de Belleisle_
(Montmedy, 1762); R.P. de Neuville, _Memoires du marechal duc de
Belleisle_ (Paris, 1761); D.C. (Chevrier), _La Vie politigue et
militaire du marechal duc de Belleisle_ (London, 1760), and _Testament
politique du marechal duc de Belleisle_ (Hague, 1762); _Le Codicille
et l'esprit ou commentaire des maximes du marechal duc de Belleisle_
(Amsterdam, 1761); F.M. Chayert, _Notice sur le marechal de Belleisle_
(Metz, 1856); L. Leclerc, _Eloge du marechal de Belleisle_ (Metz,
1862); E. Michel, _Eloge du marechal de Belleisle_ (Paris, 1862); and
Jobez, _La France sous Louis XV_ (6 vols., Paris, 1868-1874).
BELLE ISLE, STRAIT OF, the more northern of the two channels connecting
the Gulf of St Lawrence with the Atlantic Ocean. It separates northern
Newfoundland from Labrador, and extends N.E. and S.W. for 35 m., with a
breadth of 10 to 15 m. It derives its name from a precipitous granite
island, 700 ft. in height, at its Atlantic entrance. On this lighthouses
are maintained by the government of Canada and constant communication
with the mainland is kept up by wireless telegraphy. The strait is in
the most direct route from Europe to the St Lawrence, but is open only
from June till the end of November, and even during this period
navigation is often rendered dangerous by floating ice and fogs. Through
it Jacques Cartier sailed in 1534. The southern or Cabot Strait, between
Cape Ray in Newfoundland and Cape North in Cape Breton, was discovered
later, and the expansion below Belle Isle was long known as _La Grande
Baie_. Cabot Strait is open all the year, save for occasional
inconvenience from drift ice.
BELLENDEN (BALLANTYNE or BANNATYNE), JOHN (fl. 1533-1587), Scottish
writer, was born about the end of the 15th century, in the south-east of
Scotland, perhaps in East Lothian. He appears to have been educated,
first at the university of St Andrews and then at that of Paris, where
he took, the degree of doctor. From his own statement, in one of his
poems, we learn that he had been in the service of James V. from the
king's earliest years, and that the post he held was clerk of accounts.
At the request of James he undertook translations of Boece's _Historia
Scotorum_, which had appeared at Paris in 1527, and the first five books
of Livy. As a reward for his versions, which he finished in 1533, he was
appointed archdeacon of Moray and a canon of Ross. He was a strenuous
opponent of the Reformation and was compelled to go into exile. He is
said by some authorities to have died at Rome in 1550; by others to have
been still living in 1587. His translation of Boece, entitled _The
History and Chronicles of Scotland_, is a remarkable specimen of
Scottish prose, distinguished by its freedom and vigour of expression.
It was published in 1536; and was reprinted in 2 vols., edited by
Maitland, in 1821. The translation of Livy was not printed till 1822
(also in 2 vols.). Two MSS. of the latter are extant, one, the older, in
the Advocates' library, Edinburgh (which was the basis of the normalized
text of 1822), the other (c. 1550) in the possession of Mr Ogilvie
Forbes of Boyndlie. An edition of the work was edited for the Scottish
Text Society by Mr W.A. Craigie (2 vols. 1901, 1903). The second volume
of this edition contains also a complete reprint of the portions of the
holograph first draft which were discovered in the British Museum in
1902. Two poems by Bellenden--_The Proheme to the Cosmographe_ and the
_Proheme of the History_--appeared in the 1536 edition of the _History
of Scotland_. Others, bearing his name in the well-known Bannatyne MS.
collection, made by his namesake George Bannatyne (q.v.), may or may not
be his. Sir David Lyndsay, in his prologue to the _Papyngo_, speaks
vaguely of:
"Ane cunnyng Clark quhilk wrythith craftelie
Ane plant of poetis callit Ballendyne,
Quhose ornat workis my wit can nocht defyne."
The chief sources of information regarding Belleriden's life are the
_Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland_, his own works and
the ecclesiastical records.
BELLENDEN, WILLIAM, Scottish classical scholar. Hardly anything is known
of him. He lived in the reign of James I. (VI. of Scotland), who
appointed him _magister libellorum supplicum_ or master of requests.
King James is also said to have provided Bellenden with the means of
living independently at Paris, where he became professor at the
university, and advocate in the parliament. The date of his birth cannot
be fixed, and it can only be said that he died later than 1625. The
first of the works by which he is known was published anonymously in
1608, with the title _Ciceronis Princeps_, a laborious compilation of
all Cicero's remarks on the origin and principles of regal government,
digested and systematically arranged. In 1612 there appeared a similar
work, devoted to the consideration of consular authority and the Roman
senate, _Ciceronis Consul, Senator, Senatusque Romanus_. His third work,
_De Statu Prisci Orbls_, 1615, is a good outline of general history. All
three works were combined in a single large volume, entitled _De Statu
Libri Tres_, 1615, which was first brought into due notice by Dr Samuel
Parr, who, in 1787, published an edition with a preface, famous for the
elegance of its Latinity, in which he eulogized Burke, Fox and Lord
North as the "three English luminaries." The greatest of Bellenden's
works is the extensive treatise _De Tribus Luminibus Romanorum_, printed
and published posthumously at Paris in 1633. The book is unfinished, and
treats only of the first luminary, Cicero; the others intended were
apparently Seneca and Pliny. It contains a most elaborate history of
Rome and its institutions, drawn from Cicero, and thus forms a
storehouse of all the historical notices contained in that voluminous
author. It is said that nearly all the copies were lost on the passage
to England. One of the few that survived was placed in the university
library at Cambridge, and freely drawn upon by Conyers Middieton, the
librarian, in his _History of the Life of Cicero_. Both Joseph Warton
and Dr Parr accused Middleton of deliberate plagiarism, which was the
more likely to have escaped detection owing to the small number of
existing copies of Bellenden's work.
BELLEROPHON, or BELLEROPHONTES, in Greek legend, son of Glaucus or
Poseidon, grandson of Sisyphus and local hero of Corinth. Having slain
by accident the Corinthian hero Bellerus (or, according to others, his
own brother) he fled to Tiryns, where his kinsman Proetus, king of
Argos, received him hospitably and purged him of his guilt. But Anteia
(or Stheneboea), wife of Proetus, became enamoured of Bellerophon, and,
when he refused her advances, charged him with an attempt upon her
virtue. Proetus thereupon sent him to Iobates, his wife's father, king
of Lycia, with a letter or sealed tablet, in which were instructions,
apparently given by means of signs, to take the life of the bearer.
Arriving in Lycia, he was received as a guest and entertained for nine
days. On the tenth, being asked the object of his visit, he handed the
letter to the king, whose first plan for complying with it was to send
him to slay the Chimaera, a monster which was devastating the country.
Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus (q.v.), kept up in the air out of the
way of the Chimaera, but yet near enough to kill it with his spear, or,
as he is at other times represented, with his sword or with a bow. He
was next ordered out against the Solymi, a hostile tribe, and afterwards
against the Amazons, from both of which expeditions he not only returned
victorious, but also on his way back slew an ambush of chosen warriors
whom Iobates had placed to intercept him. His divine origin was now
proved; the king gave him his daughter in marriage; and the Lycians
presented him with a large and fertile estate on which he lived
(Apollodorus, ii. 3; Homer, _Iliad_, vi. 155). Bellerophon is said to
have returned to Tiryns and avenged himself on Anteia: he persuaded her
to fly with him on his winged horse, and then flung her into the sea
near the island of Melos (Schol. Aristoph., _Pax_, 140). His ambitious
attempt to ascend to the heavens on Pegasus brought upon him the wrath
of the gods. His son was smitten by Ares in battle; his daughter
Laodameia was slain by Artemis; he himself, flung from his horse, lamed
or blinded, became a wanderer over the face of the earth until his death
(Pindar, _Isthmia_, vi. [vii.], 44; Horace, _Odes_, iv. 11, 26).
Bellerophon was honoured as a hero at Corinth and in Lycia. His story
formed the subject of the _Debates_ of Sophocles, and of the
_Bellerophontes_ and _Stheneboea_ of Euripides. It has been suggested
that Perseus, the local hero of Argos, and Bellerophon were originally
one and the same, the difference in their exploits being the result of
the rivalry of Argos and Corinth. Both are connected with the sun-god
Helios and with the sea-god Poseidon, the symbol of the union being the
winged horse Pegasus. Bellerophon has been explained as a hero of the
storm, of which his conflict with the Chimaera is symbolical. The most
frequent representations of Bellerophon in ancient art are (1) slaying
the Chimaera, (2) departing from Argos with the letter, (3) leading
Pegasus to drink. Among the first is to be noted a terra-cotta relief
from Melos in the British Museum, where also, on a vase of black ware,
is what seems to be a representation of his escape from Stheneboea.
See H.A. Fischer, _Bellerophon_ (1851); R. Engelmann, _Annali_ of the
Archaeological Institute at Rome (1874); O. Treuber, _Gechichte der
Lykier_ (1887); articles in Pauly-Wissowa's _Real-Encyclopadie_, W.H.
Roscher's _Lexikon der Mythologie_, Daremberg and Saglio's
_Dictionnaire des antiquites_; L. Preller, _Griechische Mythologie_.
BELLES-LETTRES (Fr. for "fine literature"), a term used to designate the
more artistic and imaginative forms of literature, as poetry or romance,
as opposed to more pedestrian and exact studies. The term appears to
have been first used in English by Swift (1710).
BELLEVILLE, a city and port of entry of Ontario, Canada, and capital of
Hastings county, 106 m. E.N.E. of Toronto, on Bay of Quinte and the
Grand Trunk railway. Pop. (1901) 9117. Communication is maintained with
Lake Ontario and St Lawrence ports by several lines of steamers. It is
the commercial centre of a fine agricultural district, and has a large
export trade in cheese and farm produce. The principal industries are
planing mills and cement works, cheese factories and distilleries. There
are several educational institutions, including a business college, a
convent, and a government institute for the deaf and dumb. Albert
College, under the control of the Methodist church, was formerly a
university, but now confines itself to secondary education.
BELLEVILLE, a city and the county-seat of St Clair county, Illinois,
U.S.A., in the S.W. part of the state 14 m. S.E. of St Louis, Missouri.
Pop. (1890) 15,361; (1900) 17,484, of whom 2750 were foreign-born;
(1910) 21,122. Belleville is served by the Illinois Central, the
Louisville & Nashville, and the Southern railways, also by extensive
interurban electric systems; and a belt line to O'Fallon, Illinois,
connects Belleville with the Baltimore & Ohio South Western railway. A
large element of the population is of German descent or German birth,
and two newspapers are published in German, besides three dailies, three
weeklies and a semi-weekly in English. Among the industrial
establishments of the city are stove and range factories, flour mills,
rolling mills, distilleries, breweries, shoe factories, copper refining
works, nail and tack factories, glass works and agricultural implement
factories. The value of the city's factory products increased from
$2,873,334 in 1900 to $4,356,615 in 1905 or 51.6%. Belleville is in a
rich agricultural region, and in the vicinity there are valuable coal
mines, the first of which was sunk in 1852; from this dates the
industrial development of the city. Belleville was first settled in
1813, was incorporated as a city in 1850, and was re-incorporated in
1876.
BELLEY, a town of eastern France, capital of an arrondissement in the
department of Ain, 52 m. S.E. of Bourg by the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop.
(1906), town, 3709; commune, 5707. It is situated on vine-covered hills
at the southern extremity of the Jura, 3 m. from the right bank of the
Rhone. Apart from the cathedral of St Jean, which, with the exception of
the choir of 1413, is a modern building, there is little of
architectural interest in the town. Belley is the seat of a bishopric
and a prefect, and has a tribunal of first instance. The manufacture of
morocco leather goods and the quarrying of the lithographic stone of the
vicinity are carried on, and there is trade in cattle, grain, wine,
truffles and dressed pork. Belley is of Roman origin, and in the 5th
century became an episcopal see. It was the capital of the province of
Bugey, which was a dependency of Savoy till 1601, when it was ceded to
France. In 1385 the town was almost entirely destroyed by an act of
incendiarism, but was subsequently rebuilt by the dukes of Savoy, who
surrounded it with ramparts of which little is left.
BELLI, GIUSEPPE GIOACHINO (1791-1863), Italian poet, was born at Rome,
and after a period of literary employment in poor circumstances was
enabled by marriage with a lady of means to follow his own special bent.
He is remembered for his vivid popular poetry in the Roman dialect, a
number of satirical sonnets which in their own way are unique.
See Morandi's edition, _I sonetti romaneschi_ (1886-1889).
BELLIGERENCY, the state of carrying on war (Lat. _bellum_, war, and
_gerere_, to wage) in accordance with the law of nations. Insurgents are
not as such excluded from recognition as belligerents, and, even where
not recognized as belligerents by the government against which they have
rebelled, they may be so recognized by a neutral state, as in the case
of the American Civil War, when the Southern states were recognized as
belligerents by Great Britain, though regarded as rebels by the Northern
states. The recognition by a neutral state of belligerency does not,
however, imply recognition of independent political existence. The
regulations annexed to the Hague Convention, relating to the laws and
customs of war (29th of July 1899), contain a section entitled
"Belligerents" which is divided into three chapters, dealing
respectively with (i.) The Qualifications of Belligerents; (ii.)
Prisoners of War; (iii.) The Sick and Wounded. To entitle troops to the
special privileges attaching to belligerency, chapter i. provides that
all regular, militia or volunteer forces shall alike be commanded by
persons responsible for the acts of their men, that all such shall carry
distinctive emblems, recognizable at a distance, that arms shall be
carried openly and operations conducted in accordance with the usages of
war observed among civilized mankind. It provides, nevertheless, for the
emergency of the population of a territory, which has not already been
occupied by the invader, spontaneously taking up arms to resist the
invading forces, without having had time to comply with the above
requirements; they, too, are to be treated as belligerents "if they
respect the laws and customs of war." In naval war, privateering having
been finally abolished as among the parties to it by the declaration of
Paris, a privateer is not entitled, as between such parties, to the
rights of belligerency. As between states, one of whom is not a party to
the Declaration, the right to grant letters of marque would remain
intact for both parties, and the privateer, _as between them_, would be
a belligerent; as regards neutrals, the situation would be complicated
(see PRIVATEER). On prisoners of war and sick and wounded, see WAR.
(T. Ba.)
BELLINGHAM, SIR EDWARD (d. 1549), lord deputy of Ireland, was a son of
Edward Bellingham of Erringham, Sussex, his mother being a member of the
Shelley family. As a soldier he fought in France and elsewhere, then
became an English member of parliament and a member of the privy
council, and in 1547 took part in some military operations in Ireland.
In May 1548 he was sent to that country as lord deputy. Ireland was then
in a very disturbed condition, but the new governor crushed a rebellion
of the O'Connors in Leinster, freed the Pale from rebels, built forts,
and made the English power respected in Munster and Connaught.
Bellingham, however, was a headstrong man and was constantly quarrelling
with his council; but one of his opponents admitted that he was "the
best man of war that ever he had seen in Ireland." His short but
successful term of office was ended by his recall in 1549.
See R. Bagwell, _Ireland Under the Tudors_, vol. i. (1885).
BELLINGHAM, a city of Whatcom county, Washington, U.S.A., on the E. side
of Bellingham Bay, 96 m. N. of Seattle. Pop. (1900) 11,062; (1905, state
est.) 26,000; (1910, U.S. census) 24,298. Area about 23 sq. m. It is
served by the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, the Canadian
Pacific, and the Bellingham Bay & British Columbia railways--being a
terminus of the last named, which operates only 62 m. of line and
connects with the Mt. Baker goldfields and the Nooksack valley farm and
orchard region. A suburban electric line was projected in 1907. About
2-1/2 m. south-east of the city is the main body of Lake Whatcom, 13 m.
long, 1-1/4 m. wide, and 318 ft. higher than the city and the source of
its water-supply, a gravity system which cost $1,000,000, being owned by
the city. Bellingham has two Carnegie libraries. Among the principal
buildings are the county court-house, the city hall, the Young Men's
Christian Association building, and Beck's theatre, with a seating
capacity of 2200. The largest of the state's normal colleges is situated
here; in 1907 it had a faculty of 25 and 350 students; there are two
high schools, two business colleges, and one industrial school also in
the city. The excellent harbour, and the fact that Bellingham is nearer
to the great markets of Alaska than any other city in the states, make
the port an important shipping centre. In the value of manufactured
product the city was fourth in the state in 1905 (being passed only by
Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane), with a value of $3,293,988; according to a
census taken by the local chamber of commerce the value of the product
in 1906 was $7,751,464. The principal industrial establishments are
shingle (especially cedar) and saw-mills, salmon canneries and factories
for the manufacture of tin cans, and machinery used in the canning of
salmon. Motive and electric lighting power is brought 52 m. from the
falls of the north fork of the Nooksack river, where there is a power
plant which furnishes 3500 horsepower. There are deposits of clay and
limestone in the surrounding country, and cement is manufactured in the
vicinity of the city. The blue-grey Chuckanut sandstone is quarried on
the shore of Chuckanut Bay, south of Bellingham; and a coarse,
dark-brown sandstone is quarried on Sucia Island, west of the city.
There are quarries also on Waldron Island. Bellingham was formed in 1903
by the consolidation of the cities of New Whatcom (pop. in 1900, 6834)
and Fairhaven (pop. in 1900, 4228), and was chartered as a city of the
first class in 1904; it is named from Bellingham Bay, which Vancouver is
supposed to have named, in 1792, in honour of Sir Henry Bellingham.
BELLINI, the name of a family of craftsmen in Venice, three members of
which fill a great place in the history of the Venetian school of
painting in the 15th century and the first years of the 16th.
I. JACOPO BELLINI (c. 1400-1470-71) was the son of a tinsmith or
pewterer, Nicoletto Bellini, by his wife Franceschina. When the
accomplished Umbrian master Gentile da Fabriano came to practise at
Venice, where art was backward, several young men of the city took
service under him as pupils. Among these were Giovanni and Antonio of
Murano and Jacopo Bellini. Gentile da Fabriano left Venice for Florence
in 1422, and the two brothers of Murano stayed at home and presently
founded a school of their own (see VIVARINI). But Jacopo Bellini
followed his teacher to Florence, where the vast progress lately made,
alike in truth to natural fact and in sense of classic grace and style,
by masters like Donatello and Ghiberti, Masaccio and Paolo Uccello,
offered him better instruction than he could obtain even from his
Umbrian teacher. But his position as assistant to Gentile brought him
into trouble. As a stranger coming to practise in Florence, Gentile was
jealously looked on. One day some young Florentines threw stones into
his shop, and the Venetian pupil ran out and drove them off with his
fists. Thinking this might be turned against him, he went and took
service on board the galleys of the Florentine state; but returning
after a year, found he had in his absence been condemned and fined for
assault. He was arrested and imprisoned, but the matter was soon
compromised, Jacopo submitting to a public act of penance and his
adversary renouncing further proceedings. Whether Jacopo accompanied his
master to Rome in 1426 we cannot tell; but by 1429 we find him settled
at Venice and married to a wife from Pesaro named Anna (family name
uncertain), who in that year made a will in favour of her first child
then expected. She survived, however, and bore her husband two sons,
Gentile and Giovanni (though some evidences have been thought to point
rather to Giovanni having been his son by another mother), and a
daughter Nicolosia. In 1436 Jacopo was at Verona, painting a Crucifixion
in fresco for the chapel of S. Nicholas in the cathedral (destroyed by
order of the archbishop in 1750, but the composition, a vast one of many
figures, has been preserved in an old engraving). Documents ranging from
1437 to 1465 show him to have been a member of the Scuola or mutual aid
society of St John the Evangelist at Venice, for which he painted at an
uncertain date a series of eighteen subjects of the Life of the Virgin,
fully described by Ridolfi but now destroyed or dispersed. In 1439 we
find him buying a panel of tarsia work at the sale of the effects of the
deceased painter Jacobello del Fiore, and in 1440 entering into a
business partnership with another painter of the city called Donato.
About this time he must have paid a visit to the court of Ferrara, where
there prevailed a spirit of free culture and humanism most congenial to
his tastes. Pisanello, the first great naturalist artist of north Italy,
whose influence on Jacopo at the outset of his career had been only
second to that of Gentile da Fabriano, had been some time engaged on a
portrait of Leonello d'Este, the elder son of the reigning marquis
Niccolo III. Jacopo (according to an almost contemporary sonneteer)
competed with a rival portrait, which was declared by the father to be
the better of the two. In the next year, the last of the marquis
Niccolo's life, we find him making the successful painter a present of
two bushels of wheat. The relations thus begun with the house of Este
seem to have been kept up, and among Jacopo's extant drawings are
several that seem to belong to the scheme of a monument erected to the
memory of the marquis Niccolo ten years later. He was also esteemed and
employed by Sigismondo Malatesta at the court of Rimini. In 1443 Jacopo
took as an articled pupil a nephew whom he had brought up from charity;
in 1452 he painted a banner for the Scuola of St Mary of Charity at
Venice, and the next year received a grant from the confraternity for
the marriage of his daughter Nicolosia with Andrea Mantegna, a marriage
which had the effect of transferring the gifted young Paduan master
definitively from the following of Squarcione to that of Bellini. In
1456 he painted a figure of Lorenzo Giustiniani, first patriarch of
Venice, for his monument in San Pietro de Castello, and in 1457, with a
son for salaried assistant, three figures of saints in the great hall of
the patriarch. For some time about these years Jacopo and his family
would seem to have resided at, or at least to have paid frequent visits
to Padua, where he is reported to have carried out works now lost,
including an altar-piece painted with the assistance of his sons in
1459-1460 for the Gattamelata chapel in the Santo, and several portraits
which are described by 16th-century witnesses but have disappeared. At
Venice he painted a Calvary for the Scuola of St Mark (1466). His
activity can be traced in documents down to August 1470, but in November
1471 his wife Anna describes herself as his relict, so that he must have
died some time in the interval.
The above are all the facts concerning the life of Jacopo Bellini which
can be gathered from printed and documentary records. The materials
which have reached posterity for a critical judgment on his work consist
of four or five pictures only, together with two important and
invaluable books of drawings. These prove him to have been a worthy
third, following the Umbrian Gentile da Fabriano and the Veronese
Pisanello, in that trio of remarkable artists who in the first half of
the 15th century carried towards maturity the art of painting in Venice
and the neighbouring cities. Of his pictures, an important signed
example is a life-size Christ Crucified in the archbishop's palace at
Verona. The rest are almost all Madonnas: two signed, one in the Tadini
gallery at Lovere, another in the Venice academy; a third, unsigned and
long ascribed in error to Gentile da Fabriano, in the Louvre, with the
portrait of Sigismondo Malatesta as donor; a fourth, richest of all in
colour and ornamental detail, recently acquired from private hands for
the Uffizi at Florence. Plausibly, though less certainly, ascribed to
him are a fifth Madonna at Bergamo, a warrior-saint on horseback (San
Crisogono) in the church of San Trovaso at Venice, a Crucifixion in the
Museo Correr, and an Adoration of the Magi in private possession at
Ferrara. Against this scanty tale of paintings we have to set an
abundance of drawings and studies preserved in two precious albums in
the British Museum and the Louvre. The former, which is the earlier in
date, belonged to the painter's elder son Gentile and was by him
bequeathed to his brother Giovanni. It consists of ninety-nine paper
pages, all drawn on both back and front with a lead point, an instrument
unusual at this date. Two or three of the drawings have been worked over
in pen; of the remainder many have become dim from time and rubbing. The
album at the Louvre, discovered in 1883 in the loft of a country-house
in Guienne, is equally rich and better preserved, the drawings being all
highly finished in pen, probably over effaced preliminary sketches in
chalk or lead. The range of subjects is much the same in both
collections, and in both extremely varied, proving Jacopo to have been a
craftsman of many-sided curiosity and invention. He passes
indiscriminately from such usual Scripture scenes as the Adoration of
the Magi, the Agony in the Garden, and the Crucifixion, to designs from
classic fable, copies from ancient bas-reliefs, stories of the saints,
especially St Christopher and St George, the latter many times repeated
(he was the patron saint of the house of Este), fanciful allegories of
which the meaning has now become obscure, scenes of daily life, studies
for monuments, and studies of animals, especially of eagles (the emblem
of the house of Este), horses and lions. He loves to marshal his figures
in vast open spaces, whether of architecture or mountainous landscape.
In designing such spaces and in peopling them with figures of relatively
small scale, we see him eagerly and continually putting to the test the
principles of the new science of perspective. His castellated and
pinnacled architecture, in a mixed medieval and classical spirit, is
elaborately thought out, and scarcely less so his groups and ranges of
barren hills, broken in clefts or ascending in spiral terraces. With a
predilection for tall and slender proportions, he draws the human figure
with a flowing generalized grace and no small freedom of movement; but
he does not approach either in mastery of line or in vehemence of action
a Florentine draughtsman such as Antonio Pollaiuolo. Jacopo's influence
on the development of Venetian art was very great, not only directly
through his two sons and his son-in-law Mantegna, but through other and
independent contemporary workshops of the city, in none of which did it
remain unfelt.
II. GENTILE BELLINI (1429-1430-1507), the elder son of Jacopo, first
appears independently as the painter of a Madonna, much in his father's
manner, dated 1460, and now in the Berlin museum. We have seen how in
the previous year he and his brother assisted their father in the
execution of an altar-piece for the Santo at Padua. In July 1466 we find
him contracting with the officers of the Scuola of St Mark as an
independent artist to decorate the doors of their organ. These paintings
still exist in a blackened condition. They represent four saints,
colossal in size, and designed with much of the harsh and searching
austerity which characterized the Paduan school under Squarcione. In
December of the same year Gentile bound himself to execute for the great
hall of the same company two subjects of the Exodus, to be done better
than, or at least as well as, his father's work in the same place. These
paintings have perished. For the next eight years the history of
Gentile's life and work remains obscure. But he must have risen steadily
in the esteem of his fellow-citizens, since in 1474 we find him
commissioned by the senate to restore, renew, and when necessary
replace, the series of paintings, the work of an earlier generation of
artists, which were perishing from damp on the walls of the Hall of the
Great Council in the ducal palace. This was evidently intended to be a
permanent employment, and in payment the painter was to receive the
reversion of a broker's stall in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi; a lucrative
form of sinecure frequently allotted to artists engaged for tasks of
long duration. In continuation of this work Gentile undertook a series
of independent paintings on subjects of Venetian history for the same
hall, but had apparently only finished one, representing the delivery of
the consecrated candle by the pope to the doge, when his labours were
interrupted by a mission to the East. The sultan Mahommed II. had
despatched a friendly embassy to Venice, inviting the doge to visit him
at Constantinople and at the same time requesting the despatch of an
excellent painter to work at his court. The former part of the sultan's
proposal the senate declined, with the latter they complied; and Gentile
Bellini with two assistants was selected for the mission, his brother
Giovanni being at the same time appointed to fill his place on the works
for the Hall of the Great Council. Gentile gave great satisfaction to
the sultan, and returned after about a year with a knighthood, some fine
clothes, a gold chain and a pension. The surviving fruits of his labours
at Constantinople consist of a large painting representing the reception
of an ambassador in that city, now in the Louvre; a highly finished
portrait of the sultan himself, now one of the treasures, despite its
damaged condition, of the collection of the late Sir Henry Layard; an
exquisitely wrought small portrait in water-colour of a scribe, found in
1905 by a private collector in the bazaar at Constantinople and now in
the collection of Mrs Gardner at Boston; and two pen-and-ink drawings of
Turkish types, now in the British Museum. Early copies of two or three
other similar drawings are preserved in the Stadel Institute at
Frankfurt; such copies may have been made for the use of Gentile's
Umbrian contemporary, Pinturicchio, who introduced figures borrowed from
them into some of his decorative frescoes in the Appartamento Borgia at
Rome.
A place had been left open for Gentile to continue working beside his
brother Giovanni (with whom he lived always on terms of the closest
amity) in the ducal palace; and soon after 1480 he began to carry out
his share in the great series of frescoes, unfortunately destroyed by
fire in 1577, illustrating the part played by Venice in the struggles
between the papacy and the emperor Barbarossa. These works were executed
not on the wall itself but on canvas (the climate of Venice having so
many times proved fatal to wall paintings), and probably in oil, a
method which all the artists of Venice, following the example set by
Antonello da Messina, had by this time learnt or were learning to
practise. The subjects allotted to Gentile, in addition to the
above-mentioned presentation of the consecrated candle, were as follows:
the departure of the Venetian ambassadors to the court of Barbarossa,
Barbarossa receiving the ambassadors, the pope inciting the doge and
senate to war, the pope bestowing a sword and his blessing on the doge
and his army (a drawing in the British Museum purports to be the
artist's original sketch for this composition), and according to some
authorities also the gift of the symbolic ring by the pope to the
victorious doge on his return. These works received the highest praise
both from contemporary and from later Venetian critics, but no fragment
of them survived the fire of 1577. Their character can to some extent be
judged by a certain number of kindred historical and processional works
by the same hand which have been preserved. Of such the Academy at
Venice has three which were painted between 1490 and 1500 for the Scuola
of St John the Evangelist, and represent certain events connected with a
famous relic belonging to the Scuola, namely, a supposed fragment of the
true cross. All have been, much injured and re-painted; nevertheless one
at least, showing the procession of the relic through St Mark's Place
and the thanksgiving of a father who owed to it the miraculous cure of
his son, still gives a good idea of the painter's powers and style.
Great accuracy and firmness of individual portraiture, a strong gift,
derived no doubt from his father's example, for grouping and marshalling
a crowd of personages in spaces of fine architectural perspective, the
severity and dryness of the Paduan manner much mitigated by the dawning
splendour of true Venetian colour--these are the qualities that no
injury has been able to deface. They are again manifest in an
interesting Adoration of the Magi in the Layard collection; and reappear
still more forcibly in the last work undertaken by the artist, the great
picture now at the Brera in Milan of St Mark preaching at Alexandria;
this was commissioned by the Scuola of St Mark in March 1505, and left
by the artist in his will, dated 18th of February 1507, to be finished
by his brother Giovanni. Of single portraits by this artist, who was
almost as famous for them as for processional groups, there survive one
of a doge at the Museo Correr in Venice, one of Catarina Cornaro at
Budapest, one of a mathematician at the National Gallery, another of a
monk in the same gallery, signed wrongly to all appearance with the name
of Giovanni Bellini, besides one or two others in private hands. The
features of Gentile himself are known from a portrait medallion by
Camelio, and can be recognized in two extant drawings, one at Berlin
supposed to be by the painter's own hand, and another, much larger and
more finished, at Christ Church, Oxford, which is variously attributed
to Bonsignori and A. Vivarini.
III. GIOVANNI BELLINI (1430-1431-1516) is generally assumed to have been
the second son of Jacopo by his wife Anna; though the fact that she does
not mention him in her will with her other sons has thrown some slight
doubt upon the matter. At any rate he was brought up in his father's
house, and always lived and worked in the closest fraternal relation
with Gentile. Up till the age of nearly thirty we find documentary
evidence of the two sons having served as their father's assistants in
works both at Venice and Padua. In Giovanni's earliest independent works
we find him more strongly influenced by the harsh and searching manner
of the Paduan school, and especially of his own brother-in-law Mantegna,
than by the more graceful and facile style of Jacopo. This influence
seems to have lasted at full strength until after the departure of his
brother-in-law Mantegna for the court of Mantua in 1460. The earliest of
Giovanni's independent works no doubt date from before this period.
Three of these exist at the Correr museum in Venice: a Crucifixion, a
Transfiguration, and a Dead Christ supported by Angels. Two Madonnas of
the same or even earlier date are in private collections in America, a
third in that of Signor Frizzoni at Milan; while two beautiful works in
the National Gallery of London seem to bring the period to a close. One
of these is of a rare subject, the Blood of the Redeemer; the other is
the fine picture of Christ's Agony in the Garden, formerly in the
Northbrook collection. The last-named piece was evidently executed in
friendly rivalry with Mantegna, whose version of the subject hangs near
by; the main idea of the composition in both cases being taken from a
drawing by Jacopo Bellini in the British Museum sketch-book. In all
these pictures Giovanni combines with the Paduan severity of drawing and
complex rigidity of drapery a depth of religious feeling and human
pathos which is his own. They are all executed in the old tempera
method; and in the last named the tragedy of the scene is softened by a
new and beautiful effect of romantic sunrise colour. In a somewhat
changed and more personal manner, with less harshness of contour and a
broader treatment of forms and draperies, but not less force of
religious feeling, are the two pictures of the Dead Christ supported by
Angels, in these days one of the master's most frequent themes, at
Rimini and at Berlin. Chronologically to be placed with these are two
Madonnas, one at the church of the Madonna del Orto at Venice and one in
the Lochis collection at Bergamo; devout intensity of feeling and rich
solemnity of colour being in the case of all these early Madonnas
combined with a singularly direct rendering of the natural movements and
attitudes of children.
The above-named works, all still executed in tempera, are no doubt
earlier than the date of Giovanni's first appointment to work along with
his brother and other artists in the Scuola di San Marco, where among
other subjects he was commissioned in 1470 to paint a Deluge with Noah's
Ark. None of the master's works of this kind, whether painted for the
various schools or confraternities or for the ducal palace, have
survived. To the decade following 1470 must probably be assigned a
Transfiguration now in the Naples museum, repeating with greatly ripened
powers and in a much serener spirit the subject of his early effort at
Venice; and also the great altar-piece of the Coronation of the Virgin
at Pesaro, which would seem to be his earliest effort in a form of art
previously almost monopolized in Venice by the rival school of the
Vivarini. Probably not much later was the still more famous altar-piece
painted in tempera for a chapel in the church of S. Giovanni e Paolo,
where it perished along with Titian's Peter Martyr and Tintoretto's
Crucifixion in the disastrous fire of 1867. After 1479-1480 very much of
Giovanni's time and energy must have been taken up by his duties as
conservator of the paintings in the great hall of the ducal palace, in
payment for which he was awarded, first the reversion of a broker's
place in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and afterwards, as a substitute, a
fixed annual pension of eighty ducats. Besides repairing and renewing
the works of his predecessors he was commissioned to paint a number of
new subjects, six or seven in all, in further illustration of the part
played by Venice in the wars of Barbarossa and the pope. These works,
executed with much interruption and delay, were the object of universal
admiration while they lasted, but not a trace of them survived the fire
of 1577; neither have any other examples of his historical and
processional compositions come down, enabling us to compare his manner
in such subjects with that of his brother Gentile. Of the other, the
religious class of his work, including both altar-pieces with many
figures and simple Madonnas, a considerable number have fortunately been
preserved. They show him gradually throwing off the last restraints of
the 15th-century manner; gradually acquiring a complete mastery of the
new oil medium introduced in Venice by Antonello da Messina about 1473,
and mastering with its help all, or nearly all, the secrets of the
perfect fusion of colours and atmospheric gradation of tones. The old
intensity of pathetic and devout feeling gradually fades away and gives
place to a noble, if more worldly, serenity and charm. The enthroned
Virgin and Child become tranquil and commanding in their sweetness; the
personages of the attendant saints gain in power, presence and
individuality; enchanting groups of singing and viol-playing angels
symbolize and complete the harmony of the scene. The full splendour of
Venetian colour invests alike the figures, their architectural
framework, the landscape and the sky. The altar-piece of the Frari at
Venice, the altar-piece of San Giobbe, now at the academy, the Virgin
between SS. Paul and George, also at the academy, and the altar-piece
with the kneeling doge Barbarigo at Murano, are among the most
conspicuous examples. Simple Madonnas of the same period (about
1485-1490) are in the Venice academy, in the National Gallery, at Turin
and at Bergamo. An interval of some years, no doubt chiefly occupied
with work in the Hall of the Great Council, seems to separate the
last-named altar-pieces from that of the church of San Zaccaria at
Venice, which is perhaps the most beautiful and imposing of all, and is
dated 1505, the year following that of Giorgione's Madonna at
Castelfranco. Another great altar-piece with saints, that of the church
of San Francesco de la Vigna at Venice, belongs to 1507; that of La
Corona at Vicenza, a Baptism of Christ in a landscape, to 1510; to 1513
that of San Giovanni Crisostomo at Venice, where the aged saint Jerome,
seated on a hill, is raised high against a resplendent sunset
background, with SS. Christopher and Augustine standing facing each
other below him, in front. Of Giovanni's activity in the interval
between the altar-pieces of San Giobbe and of Murano and that of San
Zaccaria, there are a few minor evidences left, though the great mass of
its results perished with the fire of the ducal palace in 1577. The
examples that remain consist of one very interesting and beautiful
allegorical picture in the Uffizi at Florence, the subject of which had
remained a riddle until it was recently identified as an illustration of
a French medieval allegory, the _Pelerinage de l'ame_ by Guillaume de
Guilleville; with a set of five other allegories or moral emblems, on a
smaller scale and very romantically treated, in the academy at Venice.
To these should probably be added, as painted towards the year 1505,
the portrait of the doge Loredano in the National Gallery, the only
portrait by the master which has been preserved, and in its own manner
one of the most masterly in the whole range of painting.
The last ten or twelve years of the master's life saw him besieged with
more commissions than he could well complete. Already in the years
1501-1504 the marchioness Isabella Gonzaga of Mantua had had great
difficulty in obtaining delivery from him of a picture of the "Madonna
and Saints" (now lost) for which part payment had been made in advance.
In 1505 she endeavoured through Cardinal Bembo to obtain from him
another picture, this time of a secular or mythological character. What
the subject of this piece was, or whether it was actually delivered, we
do not know. Albrecht Durer, visiting Venice for a second time in 1506,
reports of Giovanni Bellini as still the best painter in the city, and
as full of all courtesy and generosity towards foreign brethren of the
brush. In 1507 Gentile Bellini died, and Giovanni completed the picture
of the "Preaching of St Mark" which he had left unfinished; a task on
the fulfilment of which the bequest by the elder brother to the younger
of their father's sketch-book had been made conditional. In 1513
Giovanni's position as sole master (since the death of his brother and
of Alvise Vivarini) in charge of the paintings in the Hall of the Great
Council was threatened by an application on the part of his own former
pupil, Titian, for a joint-share in the same undertaking, to be paid for
on the same terms. Titian's application was first granted, then after a
year rescinded, and then after another year or two granted again; and
the aged master must no doubt have undergone some annoyance from his
sometime pupil's proceedings. In 1514 Giovanni undertook to paint a
Bacchanal for the duke Alfonso of Ferrara, but died in 1516; leaving it
to be finished by his pupils; this picture is now at Alnwick.
Both in the artistic and in the worldly sense, the career of Giovanni
Bellini was upon the whole the most serenely and unbrokenly prosperous,
from youth to extreme old age, which fell to the lot of any artist of
the early Renaissance. He lived to see his own school far outshine that
of his rivals, the Vivarini of Murano; he embodied, with ever growing
and maturing power, all the devotional gravity and much also of the
worldly splendour of the Venice of his time; and he saw his influence
propagated by a host of pupils, two of whom at least, Giorgione and
Titian, surpassed their master. Giorgione he outlived by five years;
Titian, as we have seen, challenged an equal place beside his teacher.
Among the best known of his other pupils were, in his earlier time,
Andrea Previtali, Cima da Conegliano, Marco Basaiti, Niccolo Rondinelli,
Piermaria Pennacchi, Martino da Udine, Girolamo Mocetto; in later time,
Pierfrancesco Bissolo, Vincenzo Catena, Lorenzo Lotto and Sebastian del
Piombo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Vasari, ed. Milanesi, vol. iii.; Ridolfi, _Le
Maraviglie_, &c., vol. i.; Francesco Sansovino, _Venezia Descritta_;
Morelli, _Notizia, &c., di un Assonimo_; Zanetti, _Pittura Veneziana_;
F. Aghietti, _Elagio Storico di Jacopo e Giovanni Bellini_; G.
Bernasconi, _Cenni intorna la vita e le opere di Jacopo Bellini_;
Moschini, _Giovanni Bellini e pittori contemporanei_; E. Galichon in
_Gazette des beaux-arts_ (1866); Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _History of
Painting in North Italy_, vol. i.; Hubert Janitschek, "Giovanni
Bellini" in Dohme's _Kunst und Kunstler_; Julius Meyer in Meyer's
_Allgemeines Kunstler-Lexikon_, vol. iii. (1885); Pompeo Molmenti, "I
pittori Bellini" in _Studi e ricerche di Storia d' Arte_; P. Paoletti,
_Raccolta di documenti inediti_, fasc. i.; Vasari, _Vite di Gentile da
Fabriano e Vittor Pisanello_, ed. Venturi; Corrado Ricci in _Rassegna
d' Arte_ (1901, 1903), and _Rivista d' Arte_ (1906); Roger Fry,
_Giovanni Bellini_ in "The Artist's Library"; Everard Meynell,
_Giovanni Bellini_ in Newnes's "Art Library" (useful for a nearly
complete set of reproductions of the known paintings); Corrado Ricci,
_Jacopo Bellini e i suoi Libri di Disegni_; Victor Goloubeff, _Les
Dessins de Jacopo Bellini_ (the two works last cited reproduce in
full, that of M. Goloubeff by far the most skilfully, the contents of
both the Paris and the London sketch-books). (S. C.)
BELLINI, LORENZO (1643-1704), Italian physician and anatomist, was born
at Florence on the 3rd of September 1643. At the age of twenty, when he
had already begun his researches on the structure of the kidneys and had
described the ducts known by his name (_Exercitatio anatomica de
structura et usu renum_, 1662), he was chosen professor of theoretical
medicine at Pisa, but soon after was transferred to the chair of
anatomy. After spending thirty years at Pisa, he was invited to Florence
and appointed physician to the grand duke Cosimo III., and was also made
senior consulting physician to Pope Clement XI. He died at Florence on
the 8th of January 1704. His works were published in a collected form at
Venice in 1708.
BELLINI, VINCENZO (1801-1835), operatic composer of the Italian school,
was born at Catania in Sicily, on the 1st of November 1801. He was
descended from a family of musicians, both his father and grandfather
having been composers of some reputation. After having received his
preparatory musical education at home, he entered the conservatoire of
Naples, where he studied singing and composition under Tritto and
Zingarelli. He soon began to write pieces for various instruments, as
well as a cantata and several masses and other sacred compositions. His
first opera, _Adelson e Savina_, was performed in 1825 at a small
theatre in Naples; his second dramatic work, _Bianca e Fernando_, was
produced next year at the San Carlo theatre of the same city, and made
his name known in Italy. His next work, _Il Pirata_ (1827), was written
for the Scala in Milan, to words by Felice Romano, with whom Bellini
formed a union of friendship to be severed only by his death. The
splendid rendering of the music by Tamburini, Rubini and other great
Italian singers contributed greatly to the success of the work, which at
once established the European reputation of its composer. In almost
every year of the short remainder of his life he produced a new operatic
work, which was received with rapture by the audiences of France, Italy,
Germany and England. The names and dates of four of Bellini's operas
familiar to most lovers of Italian music are: _I Montecchi e Capuleti_
(1830), in which the part of Romeo became a favourite with all the great
contraltos; _La Sonnambula_ (1831); _Norma_, Bellini's best and most
popular creation (1831); and _I Puritani_ (1835), written for the
Italian opera in Paris, and to some extent under the influence of French
music. In 1833 Bellini had left his country to accompany to England the
singer Pasta, who had created the part of his _Sonnambula_. In 1834 he
accepted an invitation to write an opera for the national grand opera in
Paris. While he was carefully studying the French language and the
cadence of French verse for the purpose, he was seized with a sudden
illness and died at his villa in Puteaux near Paris on the 24th of
September 1835. His operatic creations are throughout replete with a
spirit of gentle melancholy, frequently monotonous and almost always
undramatic, but at the same time irresistibly sweet. To this spirit,
combined with a rich flow of _cantilena_, Bellini's operas owe their
popularity. "I shall never forget," wrote Wagner, "the impression made
upon me by an opera of Bellini at a period when I was completely
exhausted with the everlastingly abstract complication used in our
orchestras, when a simple and noble melody was revealed anew to me."
See also G. Labat, _Bellini_ (Bordeaux, 1865); A. Pougin, _Bellini, sa
vie et ses oeuvres_ (Paris, 1868).
BELLINZONA (Ger. _Belienz_), the political capital of the Swiss canton
of Tessin or Ticino. It is 105 m. from Lucerne by the St Gotthard
railway, 19 m. from Lugano and 14 m. from Locarno at the head of the
Lago Maggiore, these two towns having been till 1881 capitals of the
canton jointly with Bellinzona. The old town is built on some hills, on
the left bank of the Tessin or Ticino river, and a little below the
junction of the main Ticino valley (the Val Leventina) with that of
Mesocco. It thus blocked the road from Germany to Italy, while a great
wall was built from the town to the river bank. Bellinzona still
possesses three picturesque castles (restored in modern times), dating
in their present form from the 15th century. They belonged for several
centuries to the three Swiss cantons which were masters of the town. The
most westerly, Castello Grande or of San Michele, belonged to Uri; the
central castle, that of Montebello, was the property of Schwyz; while
the most easterly castle, that of Sasso Corbaro, was in the hands of
Unterwalden. The 13th-century church of San Biagio (Blaise) has a
remarkable 14th-century fresco, while the collegiate church of San
Stefano dates from the 16th century. In 1900 the population of
Bellinzona was 4949, practically all Romanists and Italian-speaking.
Possibly Bellinzona is of Roman origin, but it is first mentioned in
590. It played a considerable part in the early history of Lombardy,
being a key to several Alpine passes. In the 8th century it belonged to
the bishop of Como, while in the 13th and 14th centuries it was tossed
to and fro between the cities of Milan and Como. In 1402 it was taken
from Milan by Albert von Sax, lord of the Val Mesocco, who in 1419 sold
it to Uri and Obwalden, which, however, lost it to Milan in 1422 after
the battle of Arbedo. In 1499 (like the rest of the Milanese) it was
occupied by the French, but in 1500 it was taken by Uri. In 1503 the
French king ceded it to Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, which henceforth
ruled it very harshly through their bailiffs till 1798. At that date it
became the capital of the canton Bellinzona of the Helvetic republic,
but in 1803 it was united to the newly-formed canton of Tessin.
(W. A. B. C.)
BELLMAN, KARL MIKAEL (1740-1795), Swedish poet, son of a civil servant,
was born at Stockholm on the 4th of February 1740. When quite a child he
developed an extraordinary gift of improvising verse, during the
delirium of a severe illness, weaving wild thoughts together lyrically
and singing airs of his own composition. When he was nineteen he became
clerk in a bank and afterwards in the customs, but his habits were
irregular and he was frequently in great distress, particularly after
the death of his patron, GUSTAVUS III. As early as 1757 he published
_Evangeliska Dodstankar_, meditations on the Passion from the German of
David von Schweidnitz, and during the next few years wrote, besides
other translations, a great quantity of poems, imitative for the most
part of Dalin. In 1760 appeared his first characteristic work, _Manan_
(The Moon), a satirical poem, which was revised and edited by Dalin. But
the great work of his life occupied him from 1765 to 1780, and consists
of the collections of dithyrambic odes known as _Fredmans Epistlar_
(1790) and _Fredmans Sanger_ (1791). Fredman and his friends were
well-known characters in the Stockholm pot-houses, where Bellman had
studied them from the life. No poetry can possibly smell less of the
lamp than Bellman's. He was accustomed, when in the presence of none but
confidential friends, to announce that the god was about to visit him.
He would shut his eyes, take his zither, and begin apparently to
improvise the music and the words of a long Bacchic ode in praise of
love or wine. Most of his melodies are taken direct, or with slight
adaptations, from old Swedish ballads, and still retain their
popularity. _Fredman's Epistles_ bear the clear impress of individual
genius; his torrents of rhymes are not without their method; wild as
they seem, they all conform to the rules of style, and among those that
have been preserved there are few that are not perfect in form. A great
Swedish critic has remarked that the voluptuous joviality and the humour
of Bellman is, after all, only "sorrow clad in rose-colour," and this
underlying pathos gives his poems their undying charm. His later works,
_Bacchi Tempel_ (The Temple of Bacchus) (1783), eight numbers of a
journal called _Hvad behagas?_ (What you Will) (1781), in 1780 a
religious anthology entitled in a later edition (1787) _Zions Hogtid_
(Zion's Holiday), and a translation of Gellert's _Fables_, are
comparatively unimportant. He died on the 11th of February 1795. Much of
Bellman's work was only printed after his death, _Bihang till Fredmans
Epistlar_ (Nykoping, 1809), _Fredmans Handskrifter_ (Upsala, 1813),
_Skaldestycken_ ("Poems," Stockholm, 1814) being among the most
important of these posthumous works. A colossal bronze bust of the poet
by Bystrom (erected by the Swedish Academy in 1829) adorns the public
gardens of Stockholm, and a statue by Alfred Nystrom is in the
Hasselbacken, Stockholm. Bellman had a grand manner, a fine voice and
great gifts of mimicry, and was a favourite companion of King Gustavus
III.
The best edition of his works was published at Stockholm, edited by
J.G. Carlen, with biographical notes, illustrations and music (5
vols., 1856-1861); see also monographs on Bellman by Nils Erdmann
(Stockholm, 1895) and by F. Niedner (Berlin, 1905).
BELLO, ANDRES (1781-1865), South American poet and scholar, was born at
Caracas (Venezuela) on the 29th of November 1781, and in early youth
held a minor post in the civil administration. He joined the colonial
revolutionary party, and in 1810 was sent on a political mission to
London, where he resided for nineteen years, acting as secretary to the
legations of Chile, Colombia and Venezuela, studying in the British
Museum, supplementing his small salary by giving private lessons in
Spanish, by journalistic work and by copying Jeremy Bentham's almost
indecipherable manuscripts. In 1829 he accepted a post in the Chilean
treasury, settled at Santiago and took a prominent part in founding the
national university (1843), of which he became rector. He was nominated
senator, and died at Santiago de Chile on the 15th of October 1865.
Bello was mainly responsible for the civil code promulgated on the 14th
of December 1855. His prose works deal with such various subjects as
law, philosophy, literary criticism and philology; of these the most
important is his _Gramatica castellana_ (1847), the leading authority on
the subject. But his position in literature proper is secured by his
_Silvas Americanas_, a poem written during his residence in England,
which conveys with extraordinary force the majestic impression of the
South American landscape.
Bello's complete works were issued in fifteen volumes by the Chilean
government (Santiago de Chile, 1881-1893); he is the subject of an
excellent biography (Santiago de Chile, 1882) by Miguel Luis
Amunategui. (J. F.-K.)
BELLO-HORIZONTE, or MINAS, a city of Brazil, capital of the state of
Minas Geraes since 1898, about 50 m. N.W. of Ouro Preto, connected with
the Central of Brazil railway by a branch line 9 m. in length. Pop.
(estimated) in 1906, 25,000 to 30,000. The city was built by the state
on an open plateau, and provided with all necessary public buildings,
gas, water and tramway services before the seat of government was
transferred from Ouro Preto. The cost of transfer was about L1,000,000.
The city has grown rapidly, and is considered one of the most attractive
state capitals of Brazil.
BELLONA (originally DUELLONA), in Roman mythology, the goddess of war
(_bellum_, i.e. _duellum_), corresponding to the Greek Enyo. By later
mythologists she is called sometimes the sister, daughter or wife of
Mars, sometimes his charioteer or nurse. Her worship appears to have
been promoted in Rome chiefly by the family of the Claudii, whose Sabine
origin, together with their use of the name of "Nero," has suggested an
identification of Bellona with the Sabine war goddess Nerio, herself
identified, like Bellona, with Virtus. Her temple at Rome, dedicated by
Appius Claudius Caecus (296 B.C.) during a battle with the Samnites and
Etruscans (Ovid, _Fasti_ vi. 201), stood in the Campus Martius, near the
Flaminian Circus, and outside the gates of the city. It was there that
the senate met to discuss a general's claim to a triumph, and to receive
ambassadors from foreign states. In front of it was the _columna
bellica_, where the ceremony of declaring war by the fetialis was
performed. From this native Italian goddess is to be distinguished the
Asiatic Bellona, whose worship was introduced into Rome from Comana, in
Cappadocia, apparently by Sulla, to whom she had appeared, urging him to
march to Rome and bathe in the blood of his enemies (Plutarch, _Sulla_,
9). For her a new temple was built, and a college of priests
(_Bellonarii_) instituted to conduct her fanatical rites, the prominent
feature of which was to lacerate themselves and sprinkle the blood on
the spectators (Tibullus i. 6. 45-50). To make the scene more grim they
wore black dresses (Tertullian, _De Pallio_) from head to foot. The
festival of Bellona, which originally took place on the 3rd of June, was
altered to the 24th of March, after the confusion of the Roman Bellona
with her Asiatic namesake.
See Tiesler, _De Bellonae Cultu_ (1842).
BELLOT, JOSEPH RENE (1826-1853), French Arctic explorer, was born at
Rochefort on the 18th of March 1826, the son of a farrier. With the aid
of the authorities of his native town he was enabled at the age of
fifteen to enter the naval school, in which he studied two years and
earned a high reputation. He then took part in the Anglo-French
expedition of 1845 to Madagascar, and received the cross of the Legion
of Honour for distinguished conduct. He afterwards took part in another
Anglo-French expedition, that of Parana, which opened the river La Plata
to commerce. In 1851 he joined the Arctic expedition under the command
of Captain Kennedy in search of Sir John Franklin, and discovered the
strait between Boothia Felix and Somerset Land which bears his name.
Early in 1852 he was promoted lieutenant, and in the same year
accompanied the Franklin search expedition under Captain Inglefield. As
on the previous occasion, his intelligence, devotion to duty and courage
won him the esteem and admiration of all with whom he was associated.
While making a perilous journey with two comrades for the purpose of
communicating with Sir Edward Belcher, he suddenly disappeared in an
opening between the broken masses of ice (August 1853). A pension was
granted to his family by the emperor Napoleon III., and an obelisk was
erected to his memory in front of Greenwich hospital.
BELLOWS, ALBERT F. (1829-1883), American landscape-painter, was born at
Milford, Massachusetts, on the 20th of November 1829. He first studied
architecture, then turned to painting, and worked in Paris and in the
Royal Academy at Antwerp. He painted much in England; was a member of
the National Academy of Design, and of the American Water Color Society,
New York; and an honorary member of the Royal Belgian Society of
Water-Colourists. His earlier work was _genre_, in oils; after 1865 he
used water-colours more and more exclusively and painted landscapes.
Among his water-colours are "Afternoon in Surrey" (1868); "Sunday in
Devonshire" (1876), exhibited at the Philadelphia Exposition; "New
England Village School" (1878); and "The Parsonage" (1879). He died in
Auburndale, Massachusetts, on the 24th of November 1883.
BELLOWS, HENRY WHITNEY (1814-1882), American clergyman, was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, on the 11th of June 1814. He graduated at Harvard
College in 1832, and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1837, held a
brief pastorate (1837-1838) at Mobile, Alabama, and in 1839 became
pastor of the First Congregational (Unitarian) church in New York City
(afterwards All Souls church), in charge of which he remained until his
death. Here Bellows acquired a high reputation as a pulpit orator and
lyceum lecturer, and was a recognized leader in the Unitarian Church in
America. For many years after 1846 he edited _The Christian Inquirer_, a
Unitarian weekly paper, and he was also for some time an editor of _The
Christian Examiner_. In 1857 he delivered a series of lectures in the
Lowell Institute course, on "The Treatment of Social Diseases." At the
outbreak of the Civil War he planned the United States Sanitary
Commission, of which he was the first and only president (1861 to 1878).
He was the first president of the first Civil Service Reform Association
organized in the United States (1877), was an organizer of the Union
League Club and of the Century Association in New York City, and planned
with his parishioner and friend, Peter Cooper, the establishment of
Cooper Union. In 1865 he proposed and organized the national conference
of Unitarian and other Christian churches, and from 1865 to 1880 was
chairman of its council. He died in New York City on the 30th of January
1882. A bronze memorial tablet by Augustus Saint Gaudens was unveiled in
All Souls church in 1886. His published writings include _Restatements
of Christian Doctrine in Twenty-Five Sermons_ (1860); _Unconditioned
Loyalty_ (1863), a strong pro-Union sermon, which was widely circulated
during the Civil War; _The Old World in its New Face: Impressions of
Europe in 1867-1868_ (2 vols., 1868-1869); _Historical Sketch of the
Union League Club_ (1879); and _Twenty-Four Sermons in All Souls Church,
New York, 1865-1881_ (1886).
See Russell N. Bellows, _Henry Whitney Bellows_ (Keene, N.H., 1897), a
biographical sketch reprinted from T.B. Peck's _Bellows Family
Genealogy_; John White Chadwick, _Henry W. Bellows: His Life and
Character_ (New York, 1882), a memorial address; and Charles J Stille,
_History of the United States Sanitary Commission_ (Philadelphia,
1866).
BELLOWS and BLOWING MACHINES, appliances used for producing currents of
air, or for moving volumes of air from one place to another. Formerly
all such artificially-produced currents of air were used to assist the
combustion of fires and furnaces, but now this purpose only forms a part
of the uses to which they are put. Blowing appliances, among which are
included bellows, rotary fans, blowing engines, rotary blowers and
steam-jet blowers, are now also employed for forcing pure air into
buildings and mines for purposes of ventilation, for withdrawing
vitiated air for the same reason, and for supplying the air or other gas
which is required in some chemical processes. Appliances of this kind
differ from _air compressors_ in that they are primarily intended for
the transfer of quantities of air at low pressures, very little above
that of the atmosphere, whereas the latter are used for supplying air
which has previously been raised to a pressure which may be many times
that of the atmosphere (see POWER TRANSMISSION: _Pneumatic_).
Among the earliest contrivances employed for producing the movement of
air under a small pressure were those used in Egypt during the Greek
occupation. These depended upon the heating of the air, which, being
raised in pressure and bulk, was made to force water out of closed
vessels, the water being afterwards employed for moving some kind of
mechanism. In the process of iron smelting there is still used in some
parts of India an artificial blast, produced by a simple form of bellows
made from the skins of goats; bellows of this kind probably represent
one of the earliest contrivances used for producing currents of air.
The _bellows_[1] now in use consists, in its simplest form, of two flat
boards, of rectangular, circular or pear shape, connected round their
edges by a wide band of leather so as to include an air chamber, which
can be increased or diminished in volume by separating the boards or
bringing them nearer together. The leather is kept from collapsing, on
the separation of the boards, by several rings of wire which act like
the ribs of animals. The lower board has a hole in the centre, covered
inside by a leather flap or valve which can only open inwards; there is
also an open outlet, generally in the form of a pipe or nozzle, whose
aperture is much smaller than that of the valve. When the upper board is
raised air rushes into the cavity through the valve to fill up the
partial vacuum produced; on again depressing the upper board the valve
is closed by the air attempting to rush out again, and this air is
discharged through the open nozzle with a velocity depending on the
pressure exerted.
The current of air produced is evidently not continuous but intermittent
or in puffs, because an interval is needed to refill the cavity after
each discharge. In order to remedy this drawback the _double bellows_
are used. To understand their action it is only necessary to conceive an
additional board with valve, like the lower board of the single bellows,
attached in the same way by leather below this lower board. Thus there
are three boards, forming two cavities, the two lower boards being
fitted with air-valves. The lowest board is held down by a weight and
another weight rests on the top board. In working these double bellows
the lowest board is raised, and drives the air from the lower cavity
into the upper. On lowering the bottom board again a fresh supply of air
is drawn in through the bottom valve, to be again discharged when the
board is raised. As the air passes from the lower to the upper cavity it
is prevented from returning by the valve in the middle board, and in
this way a quantity of air is sent into the upper cavity each time the
lowest board is raised. The weight on the top board provides the
necessary pressure for the blast, and at the same time causes the
current of air delivered to be fairly continuous. When the air is being
forced into the upper cavity the weight is being raised, and, during
the interval when the lowest board is descending, the weight is slowly
forcing the top board down and thus keeping up the flow of air.
[Illustration: FIGS. 1 and 2.--Common Smiths' Bellows.]
Hand-bellows for domestic use are generally shaped like a pear, with the
hinge at the narrow end. The same shape was adopted for the older forms
of smiths' bellows, with the difference that two bellows were used
superposed, in a manner similar to that just described, so as to provide
for a continuous blast. In the later form of smiths' bellows the same
principle is employed, but the boards are made circular in shape and are
always maintained roughly parallel to one another. These are shown on
figs. 1 and 2. Here A is the blast pipe, B the movable lowest board, C
the fixed middle board, close to which the pipe A is inserted, and D is
the movable uppermost board pressed upon by the weight shown. The board
B is raised by means of a hand lever L, through either a chain or a
connecting rod, and lowered by a weight. The size of the weight on D
depends on the air pressure required. For instance, if a blast pressure
of half a pound per square inch is wanted and the boards are 18 in. in
diameter, and therefore have an area of 254 sq. in., on each of the 254
sq. in. there is to be a pressure of half a pound, so that the weight to
balance this must be half multiplied by 254, or 127 lb. The diameter of
the air-pipe can be varied to suit the required conditions. Instead of
bellows with flexible sides, a sliding arrangement is sometimes used;
this consists of what are really two boxes fitting into one another with
the open sides both facing inwards, as if one were acting as a lid to
the other. By having a valve and outlet pipe fitted as in the bellows
and sliding them alternately apart and together, an intermittent blast
is produced. The chief defect of this arrangement is the leakage of air
caused by the difficulty in making the joint a sufficiently good fit to
be air-tight.
_Blowing Engines._--Where larger quantities of air at higher pressures
than can conveniently be supplied by bellows are required, as for blast
furnaces and the Bessemer process of steel-making, what are termed
"blowing engines" are used. The mode of action of a blowing engine is
simple. When a piston, accurately fitting a cylinder which has one end
closed, is forcibly moved towards the other end, a partial vacuum is
formed between the piston and the blank end, and if this space be
allowed to communicate with the outer atmosphere air will flow in to
fill the vacuum. When the piston has completed its movement or "stroke,"
the cylinder will have been filled with air. On the return of the
piston, if the valve through which the air entered is now closed and a
second one communicating with a chamber or pipe is opened, the air in
the cylinder is expelled through this second valve. The action is
similar to that of the bellows, but is carried out in a machine which is
much better able to resist higher pressures and which is more convenient
for dealing with large quantities of air. The valves through which the
atmosphere or "free" air is admitted are called "admission" or "suction"
valves, and those through which the air is driven from the cylinder are
the "discharge" or "delivery" valves. Formerly one side only of the
blowing piston was used, the engine working "single-acting"; but now
both sides of the piston are utilized, so that when it is moving in
either direction suction will be taking place on one side and delivery
on the other. All processes in connexion with which blowing engines are
used require the air to be above the pressure of the outer atmosphere.
This means that the discharge valves do not open quite at the beginning
of the delivery stroke, but remain closed until the air in the cylinder
has been reduced in volume and so increased in pressure to that of the
air in the discharge chamber.
The power used to actuate these blowing-engines is in most cases steam,
the steam cylinder being placed in line or "tandem" with the air
cylinder, so that the steam piston rod is continuous with or directly
joined to the piston rod of the air cylinder. This plan is always
adopted where the cylinders are placed horizontally, and often in the
case of vertical engines. The engines are generally built in pairs, with
two blowing cylinders and one high-pressure and one low-pressure steam
cylinder, the piston rods terminating in connecting rods which are
attached to the pins of the two cranks on the shaft. In the centre of
this shaft, midway between the two engines, there is usually placed a
heavy flywheel which helps to maintain a uniform speed of turning. Some
of the largest blowing engines built in Great Britain are arranged as
beam engines; that is to say, there is a heavy rocking beam of cast iron
which in its middle position is horizontal. One end of this beam is
linked by a short connecting rod to the end of the piston rod of the
blowing cylinder, while the other end is similarly linked to the top of
the steam piston rod, so that as the steam piston comes up the air
piston goes down and _vice versa_. At the steam end of the beam a third
connecting rod works the crank of a flywheel shaft.
About the end of the 19th century an important development took place
which consisted in using the waste gas from blast furnaces to form with
air an explosive mixture, and employing this mixture to drive the piston
of the actuating cylinder in precisely the same manner as the explosive
mixture of coal gas and air is used in a gas engine. Since the majority
of blowing engines are used for providing the air required in iron blast
furnaces, considerable saving should be effected in this way, because
the gas which escapes from the top of the furnace is a waste product and
costs nothing to produce.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Section of Cylinder of Early Blowing Engine
(1851).]
The general action of a blowing engine may be illustrated by the
sectional view shown on fig. 3, which represents the internal view of
one of the blowing cylinders of the engines erected at the Dowlais
Ironworks as far back as 1851. Many of the details are now obsolete, but
the general scheme is the same as in all blowing engines. Here A is the
air cylinder; in this is a piston whose rod is marked R; this piston is
usually made air-tight by some form of packing fitted into the groove
which runs round its edge. In this particular case the cylinder is
placed vertically and its piston rod is actuated from the end of a
rocking beam. The top and bottom ends are closed by covers and in these
are a number of openings controlled by valves opening inwards so that
air can flow freely in but cannot return. The piston is shown moving
downwards. Air is now being drawn into the space above the piston
through the valves v at the top, and the air in the space A below the
piston, drawn in during the previous up-stroke, is being expelled
through the valve v' into the discharge chamber B, thence passing to the
outlet pipe O. The action is reversed on the up-stroke. Thus it will be
seen that air is being delivered both during the up-stroke and the
down-stroke, and therefore flows almost continuously to the furnaces.
There must, however, be momentary pauses at the ends of the strokes when
the direction of movement is changed, and as the piston, though worked
from an evenly rotating crank shaft, moves more quickly at the middle
and slows down to no speed at the ends of its travel, there must be a
considerable variation in the speed of delivery of the air. The air is
therefore led from O into a large storage chamber or reservoir, whence
it is again taken to the furnace; if this reservoir is made sufficiently
large the elasticity of the air in it will serve to compensate for the
irregularities, and a nearly uniform stream of air will flow from it.
The valves used in this case and in most of the older blowing engines
consist of rectangular metal plates hinged at one of the longer edges;
these plates are faced with leather or india rubber so as to allow them
to come to rest quietly and without clatter and at the same time to make
them air-tight. It will be seen that some of these valves hang
vertically and others lie flat on the bottom of the cover. The Dowlais
cylinder is very large, having a diameter of 12 ft. and a piston stroke
of 12 ft., giving a discharge of 44,000 cub. ft. of air per minute, at a
pressure of 4-1/4 lb. to the square inch.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Vertical Section of Lackenby Blowing Engines
(1871).]
A later design of blowing engine, built in 1871 for the Lackenby
iron-works, Middlesbrough, is shown in section in fig. 4, and is of a
type which is still the most common, especially in the north of England.
Here A, the high-pressure steam cylinder, and C, the low-pressure one,
are placed in tandem with the air cylinders B, B, whose pistons they
actuate. In these blowing cylinders the inlet valves in the bottom are
circular disk valves of leather, eighteen in number; the inlet valves T
on the top of the cylinder are arranged in ten rectangular boxes, having
openings in their vertical sides, inside which are hung leather flap
valves. The outlet valves O are ten in number at each end of the
cylinders, and are hung against flat gratings which are arranged round
the circumference. The blast is delivered into a wrought iron casing M
which surrounds the cylinder. The combined area of the inlet valves is
860 sq. in., or one-sixth the area of the piston. The speed is
twenty-four revolutions per minute and the air delivered at this speed
is 15,072 cubic ft. per minute, the horse-power in the air cylinders
being 258. The circulating pump E, air pump F, and feed pumps G, G, are
worked off the cross-head on the low-pressure side.
A more modern form of blowing engine erected at the Dowlais works about
the end of the 19th century, may be taken as typical of the present
design of vertical blowing engine in use in Great Britain. The two air
cylinders are placed below and in tandem with the steam cylinders as in
the last case. The piston rods also terminate in connecting rods working
on to the crank shaft. The air cylinders are each 88 in. in diameter,
and the high and low pressure cylinders of the compound steam engine are
30 in. and 64 in. respectively, while the common stroke of all four is
60 in. The pressure of the air delivered varies from 4-1/2 to 10 lb. per
sq. in. and the quantity per minute is 25,000 cub. ft. Each engine
develops about 1200 horse-power. It is to be noted that flap valves such
as those used in the 1851 Dowlais engine have in most cases given place
to a larger number of circular steel disk valves, held to their seats by
springs.
In a large blowing engine built in 1905 by Messrs Davy Bros. of
Sheffield for the North-Eastern Steel Company at Middlesbrough (see
_Engineering_, January 6, 1905) the same arrangement was adopted as in
that just described. The two air cylinders are each 90 in. diameter and
have a stroke of 72 in. The capacity of this engine is 52,000 cub. ft.
of air per minute, delivered at a pressure of from 12-1/2 to 15 lb. per
sq. in. when running at a speed of thirty-three revolutions per minute.
The air valves consist of a large number of steel disks resting on
circular seatings and held down by springs, which for the delivery
valves are so adjusted in strength that they lift and release the air
when the desired working pressure has been reached. It is worthy of note
that in this engine no attempt is made to make the air pistons air-tight
in the usual way by having packing rings set in grooves round the edge,
but the piston is made deeper than usual and turned so as to be a very
good fit in the cylinder and one or two small grooves are cut round the
edge to hold the lubricant.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Richardsons, Westgarth & Co.'s Blowing Engine.]
To illustrate a blowing engine driven by a gas engine supplied with
blast furnace gas, fig. 5 gives a diagrammatic view of the blowing
cylinder of an engine built by Messrs Richardsons, Westgarth & Co. of
Middlesbrough about 1905. The gas cylinder is not shown. It will be seen
that the air cylinder is horizontal, and it is arranged to work in
tandem with the gas motor cylinder. The chief point of interest is to be
found in the arrangement of the details of the air cylinder. Its
diameter is 86-1/2 in. and the length of piston stroke 55 in. As to the
arrangement of the valves, if the piston be moving in the direction
shown, on the left side of the piston at A air is being discharged, and
follows the course indicated by the arrows, so as first to pass into the
annular chamber which forms a continuation of the space A, and thence,
through the spring-controlled steel disk valves v', into the discharge
chamber C, which ultimately leads to the blast pipe. It will be seen
that the valves v on the other side of the annular chamber are closed.
At the same time a partial vacuum is being formed in the space B, to be
filled by the inflow of air through the valves v which are now open, the
corresponding discharge valves v' being closed. These valves on the
inside and outside of the annular spaces referred to are arranged so as
to form a circle round the ends of the barrel of the cylinder. The free
air, instead of being drawn into the valves v direct from the air of the
engine house, is taken from an enclosed annular chamber E, which may be
in communication with the clean, cool air outside. It will be seen that
the piston is made deep so as to allow for a long bearing surface in the
cylinder. Two metal packing rings are provided to render the piston
air-tight. The horse-power of this engine, which is designed on the
Cockerell system, is 750.
Air valves of other types than those which have been mentioned have been
tried, such as sliding grid valves, rotatory slide valves and piston
valves, but it has been found that either flap or disk lift valves are
more satisfactory for air on account of the grit which is liable to get
between slide valves and their seatings. In some of the blowing engines
made by Messrs Fraser & Chalmers (see _Engineer_, June 15, 1906), sheets
of flexible bronze act as flap valves both for admission and delivery,
the part which actually closes the opening being thickened for strength.
The pressure of the air supplied by blowing engines depends upon the
purposes for which it is to be used. In charcoal furnaces the pressure
is very low, being less than 1 lb. per sq. in.; for blast furnaces using
coal an average value of 4 lb. is common; for American blast furnaces
using coke or anthracite coal the pressure is as high as 10 lb.; while
for the air required in the Bessemer process of steel-making pressures
up to 25 or 30 lb. per sq. in. are not uncommon. According to British
practice one large blowing engine is used to supply several blast
furnaces, while in America a number of smaller ones is used, one for
each furnace.
_Rotary blowers_ occupy a position midway between blowing engines and
fan blowers, being used for purposes requiring the delivery of large
volumes of air at pressures lower than those of blowing engines, but
higher than those of fan blowers. The blowing engine draws in,
compresses and delivers its air by the direct action of air-tight
pistons; the same effect is aimed at in a rotary blower with the
difference that the piston revolves instead of moving up and down a
cylinder.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Thwaites' Improved Roots' Blower.]
Two of the best-known machines of this kind are Roots' and Baker's, both
American devices. The mode of action of Roots' blower, as made by Messrs
Thwaites Bros. of Bradford, will be clear from the section shown on fig.
6. The moving parts work in a closed casing B, which consists of
half-cylindrical curved plates placed a little more than their own
radius apart, the ends being enclosed by two plates. Within the casing,
and barely touching the curved part of the casing and each other,
revolve two parts C, D, called "revolvers," the speed of rotation of
which is the same, but the direction opposite. They are compelled to
keep their proper relative positions by a pair of equal spur wheels
fixed on the ends of the shafts on which they run. The free air enters
the casing through a wire screen at A and passes into the space E.
As the space E increases in volume owing to the movement of the
revolvers, air is drawn in; it is then imprisoned between D and the
casing, as shown at G, and is carried round until it is free to enter F,
from which it is in turn expelled by the lessening of this space as the
lower ends of the revolvers come together. In this way a series of
volumes of air is drawn in through A, to be afterwards expelled from H
in an almost perfectly continuous stream, this result being brought
about by the relative variation in volume of the spaces E, F and G. In
their most improved form the revolvers are made hollow, of cast iron,
and accurately machined to a form such that they always keep close to
one another and to the end casing without actually touching, there being
never more space for the escape of air than 1/32nd of an inch. Machines
after this design are made from the smallest size, delivering 25 cub.
ft., to the largest, with a capacity of 25,000 cub. ft. per minute
working up to a pressure of 3 lb. per sq. in. It is not found economical
to attempt to work at higher pressures, as the leakage between the
revolvers and the casing becomes too great; where a higher pressure is
desired two or more blowers can be worked in series, the air being
raised in pressure by steps. A blower using 1 H.P. will deliver 350 cub.
ft. of air per minute and one using 2-3/4 H.P. will deliver 800 cub.
ft., at a pressure suitable for smiths' fires. At the higher pressure
required for cupola work--somewhere about 3/4 lb. per sq. in.--6-1/2
H.P. will deliver 1300, and 123 H.P. 25,000 cub. ft. per minute. In the
Baker blower three revolvers are used--a large one which acts as the
rotating piston and two smaller ones forming air locks or valves.
_Rotary Fans._--Now that power for driving them is so generally
available, rotary blowing fans have for many purposes taken the place of
bellows. They are used for blowing smiths' fires, for supplying the
blast for iron melting cupolas and furnaces and the forced draught for
boiler fires, and for any other purpose requiring a strong blast of air.
Their construction will be clear from the two views (figs. 7 and 8) of
the form made by Messrs Gunther of Oldham, Lancashire. The fan consists
of a circular casing A having the general appearance of a snail shell.
Within this casing revolves a series of vanes B--in this case
five--curved as shown, and attached together so as to form a wheel whose
centre is a boss or hub. This boss is fixed to a shaft or spindle which
revolves in bearings supported on brackets outside the casing. As the
shaft is rotated, the vanes B are compelled to revolve in the direction
indicated by the arrow on fig. 7, and their rotation causes the air
within the casing to rotate also. Thus a centrifugal action is set up by
which there is a diminution of pressure at the centre of the fan and an
increase against the outer casing. In consequence air is sucked in, as
shown by the arrows on fig. 8, through the openings C, C, at the centre
of the casing around the spindle. At the same time the air which has
been forced towards the outside of the casing and given a rotary motion
is expelled from the opening at D (fig. 8). All blowing fans work on the
same principle, though differences in detail are adopted by different
makers to meet the variety of conditions under which they are to be
used. Where the fan is to be employed for producing a delivery or blast
of air the opening D is connected to an air pipe which serves to
transmit the current of air, and C is left open to the atmosphere; when,
however, the main object is suction, as in the case where the fan is
used for ventilation, the aperture C is connected through a suction pipe
with the space to be exhausted, D being usually left open. Gunther fans
range in size from those which have a diameter of fan disk of 8 in. and
make 5500 revolutions per minute, to those which have a diameter of 50
in. and run at from 950 to 1200 revolutions per minute. For exhausting
the fans are run less quickly than for blowing, the speed for a fan of
10 in. diameter being 4800 revolutions for blowing and 3300-4000 for
exhausting, while the 50-in. fan only runs at 550-700 when exhausting.
These two exhausting fans remove 400-500 and 12,000-15,000 cub. ft. of
air per minute respectively.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.--Gunther's Blowing Fan.]
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--Gunther's Blowing Fan.]
The useful effect of rotary fans, that is to say the proportion of the
total power used to drive the fan which is actually utilized in
producing the current of air, is very low for the smaller sizes, but may
rise to 30-70% in sizes above 5 ft. in diameter. It has its maximum
value for any given fan at a certain definite speed. Fans are most
suitable in cases where it is required to move or deliver comparatively
large volumes of air at pressures which are little above that of the
atmosphere. Where the pressure of the current produced exceeds a quarter
of a pound on the square inch the waste of work becomes so great as to
preclude their use. The fan is not the most economical form of blower,
but it is simple and inexpensive, both in first cost and in maintenance.
The largest fans are used for ventilating purposes, chiefly in mines,
their diameters rising to 40 or even 50 ft. The useful effect of some of
these larger fans, as obtained from experiments, is as high as 75%. In
the case of the Capell fan, which differs from other forms in that it
has two series of blades, inner and outer, separated by a curved blank
piece between the inner wings, dipping into the fan inlet, and the outer
wings, very high efficiencies have been obtained, being as great as 90%
in some cases. Capell fans are used for ventilating mines, buildings,
and ships, and for providing induced currents for use in boiler
furnaces. In the larger fans the casing, instead of having a curved
section, is more often built of sheet steel and is given a rectangular
section at right angles to the periphery. The Sirocco blowing fan, of
Messrs Davidson of Belfast, has a larger number of blades, which are
relatively narrow as measured radially, but wide axially. It can be made
much smaller in diameter than fans of the older designs for the same
output of air--a great advantage for use in ships or in buildings where
space is limited--and its useful effect is also said to be superior.
(See also HYDRAULICS, S 213.)
_Helical or screw blowers_, often called "air propellers," are used
where relatively large volumes of air have to be moved against hardly
any perceptible difference in pressure, chiefly for purposes of
ventilation and drying. Most often the propeller is used to move air
from one room or chamber to another adjoining, and is placed in a light
circular iron frame which is fixed in a hole in the wall through which
the air is to be passed. The propeller itself consists of a series of
vanes or wings arranged helically on a revolving shaft which is fixed in
the centre of the opening. The centre line of the shaft is perpendicular
to the plane of the opening so that when the vanes revolve the air is
drawn towards and through the opening and is propelled away from it as
it passes through. The action is similar to that of a steamship screw
propeller, air taking the place of water. Such blowers are often driven
by small electric motors working directly on the end of the shaft. For
moving large volumes of air against little pressure and suction they are
very suitable, being simpler than fans, cheaper both in first cost and
maintenance for the same volume of air delivered, and less likely to
fail or get out of order. To obtain the best effect for the power used a
certain maximum speed of rotation must not be exceeded; at higher speeds
a great deal of the power is wasted. For example, a propeller with a
vane diameter of 2-1/2 ft. was found to deliver a volume of air
approximately proportional to the speed up to about 700 revolutions per
minute, when 8000 cub. ft. per minute were passed through the machine;
but doubling this speed to 1400 revolutions per minute only increased
delivery by 1000 cub. ft. to 9000. At the lower of these speeds the
horse-power absorbed was 0.6 and at the higher one 1.6.
_Other Appliances for producing Currents of Air._--In its primitive form
the "trompe" or water-blowing engine adopted in Savoy, Carniola, and
some parts of America, consists of a long vertical wooden pipe
terminating at its lower end in an air chest. Water is allowed to enter
the top of the pipe through a conical plug and, falling down in
streamlets, carries with it air which is drawn in through sloping holes
near the top of the pipe. In this way a quantity of air is delivered
into the chamber, its pressure depending on the height through which the
water falls. This simple arrangement has been developed for use in
compressing large volumes of air at high pressures to be used for
driving compressed air machinery. It is chiefly used in America, and
provides a simple and cheap means of obtaining compressed air where
there is an abundant natural supply of water falling through a
considerable height. The pressure obtained in the air vessel is somewhat
less than half a pound per square inch for every foot of fall.
Natural sources of water are also used for compressing and discharging
air by letting the water under its natural pressure enter and leave
closed vessels, so alternately discharging and drawing in new supplies
of air. Here the action is the same as in a blowing engine, the water
taking the place of the piston. This method was first thoroughly
developed in connexion with the Mt. Cenis tunnel works, and its use has
since been extended.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Steam-jet Blower.]
In the _jet blower_ (fig. 9) a jet of steam is used to induce a current
of air. Into one end of a trumpet-shaped pipe B projects a steam pipe A.
This steam pipe terminates in a small opening, say, one-eighth of an
inch, through which the steam is allowed to flow freely. The effect is
to cause a movement of the air in the pipe, with the result that a fresh
supply is drawn in through the annular opening at C, C, and a continuous
stream of air passes along the pipe. This is the form of blower made by
Messrs Meldrum Bros. of Manchester, and is largely used for delivering
air under the fire bars of boiler and other furnaces. In some cases the
jets of steam are allowed to enter a boiler furnace above the fire, thus
inducing a current of air which helps the chimney draught and is often
used to do away with the production of smoke; they are also used for
producing currents of air for purposes other than those of boiler fires,
and are very convenient where considerable quantities of air are wanted
at very low pressures and where the presence of the moisture of the
steam does not matter.
Sometimes jets of high-pressure air flowing at great velocities are used
to induce more slowly-moving currents of larger volumes of air at low
pressures. (W. C. P.)