Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting ed. by David Alan Brown, Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 185 lated into Venetian pictorial dialect” (44). Examples of the half-length Madonna, the Bellini brothers’ favored type, are discussed to further exemplify this Veneto-Byzantine style, while Cretan icons of the Madre della Consolazione type are briefly contrasted as representatives of what Byzantinists would call Creto-Venetian style. Campbell is right to notice that, even though Greek and Venetian painters had different reasons for merging each others’ distinctive styles—commercial concerns or the close association Europeans made between Byzantine art and sanctity—it is not clear if any devotional distinction existed in the actual use of the emerging images (59). Unfortunately, discussions of the examples included in the catalogue do not move far beyond an all-too-familiar discourse, limited to identifying whether a painting is “Latin-inspired” or “Byzantine-looking.” Like the exhibition, the catalogue aims to blur the east versus west dichotomy , where western art is often artificially elevated. Written (in most part) from a western perspective, however, this catalogue proves how difficult it is to escape the modern borders of scholarly fields, even while looking at artists and patrons who themselves, over 500 years ago, managed to synthesize brilliantly the quintessential values of their cosmopolitan Mediterranean reality. The Italian images of Mehmed II suggest that, despite religious concerns, he admired European art and actively constructed a European image for himself. He requested established artists from various Italian courts and commissioned medals and painted portraits glorifying him as a successor of Alexander the Great. At his court, Greek scholars and bureaucrats worked alongside their Muslim peers. However, J. M Rogers and Alan Chong show that, even though Mehmed’s library and art collection joined cultures, his successors did not share his tolerance towards the occident, and thus his patronage was less influential than perhaps he might have expected. Chong’s essay, “Gentile Bellini in Istanbul: Myths and Misunderstandings,” is one of the strengths of the catalogue, disentangling the intricacies of Gentile ’s eastern visit. A close analysis of the artist’s few works securely dated to his Istanbul period clarifies their chronology and attribution. Last but not least, the artist who preceded Bellini at the Sultan’s court in 1478–1479, Costanzo da Ferrara, is firmly identified as Costanzo di Moysis. Little is known about this Italian, originally from Venice but active in Ferrara and Naples, whose oeuvre cannot be reconstructed in the absence of stylistic evidence. The second half of the fifteenth century marks the height of Italian fascination with the east. It was a period of explosive cultural dialogue—one that continues to stir our scholarly fascination today. The exhibition curators and the authors of this catalogue were successful in presenting Gentile Bellini as a case study, offering a reconsideration of an artist who, during his lifetime, was considered Venice’s most important painter. CRISTINA STANCIOIU, Art History, UCLA Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, ed. David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art 2006) 336 pages, 31 halftone + 162 color ill. This substantial, abundantly illustrated catalogue, created to accompany exhibitions at the National Gallery in Washington and the Kunsthistoriches Mu- REVIEWS 186 seum in Vienna, brings together some of the foremost scholars of Venetian art to shed new light on a significant moment in the history of Venetian painting. The exhibitions highlighted a period of considerable stylistic change in the painting of the Venetian schools from 1500 to 1530. The exhibitions and the catalogue were meant to illustrate this transition by bringing together the paintings of not only the three masters listed in the title, but also other lesser-known painters of the beginning of the sixteenth century like Lorenzo Lotto, Cima da Conegliano, and Vincenzo Catena. The catalogue brings together these artists seamlessly, creating for the reader a vivid picture of the artistic world of early sixteenth-century Venice. By not concentrating on a single artist, as many exhibitions do, the catalog presents a more complete idea of artistic development in all genres of paintings. Few scholars of Venetian art would doubt the significance of the three decades chosen by the exhibition organizers in the history of the city’s painting. During these thirty...