Word: bellinis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods has long been a puzzle as well as a masterpiece. The gods look more drunk than divine. Vesta, protector of virgins, lies dozing in one corner of the picture while Priapus fiddles with her skirt. A blowsy Ceres helps Apollo hoist cup to lip. Neptune is paired off with Gaea, who holds a quince -the symbol of marriage. Bacchus appears as a child, and his foster father Silenus looks more like a slender ascetic than a roly-poly satyr. Generations of art scholars have wondered...
Smith College Professor Edgar Wind thinks he has found the answer. In a recently published book (Bellini's Feast of the Gods, Harvard University, $7.50), he argues that the key to the riddle is Gaea's symbolic quince. The Feast, he says, is really a wedding party; Gaea is Lucrezia Borgia; Neptune is her husband, Alfonso d'Este, who commissioned the painting...
...Giovanni Bellini achieved more than one such masterpiece, creations not only of his own genius but also of the age and place in which he lived. While Baldovinetti labored in Florence, and Luini in Milan, Bellini breathed the glittering, clear splendor of Venice, which lay like a wide galleon of marble and mosaic moored to the Adriatic shore. Bellini's father, brother and brother-in-law (Mantegna) were all famed painters, who brilliantly adapted and modified in varying degrees the jewel-hard Byzantine art which trade with the East had brought to Venice. Giovanni Bellini did more; he created...
...brows, like two bows, and a delicately pursed mouth, in the accepted tradition, and made her cool and peaceful as a cloud. And she never changed, essentially, in all his later paintings of her; she only became more real, more human and more alive each time. Before he died, Bellini's faith and art had combined to create Madonnas like the one here reproduced, which were credibly like the Virgin the Wise Men found at Bethlehem: a living woman, and the Mother of God. The compassion in that Madonna's look, and in her hands which both protect...
...when he was past 80, Giovanni Bellini cleaned his brushes and closed his eyes for the last time. He himself was leaving Venice richer than he had found it; and two of his students gave the old man cause for pride. They were Giorgione and Titian...