Word: giovannis
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Fifteenth Century Venice stood out of the Adriatic in a blaze of gold, ultramarine and many-colored marble. There Giovanni Bellini grew up, amidst a half-Oriental riot of clear colors. Scores of carved and painted ships furled their emblazoned sails at the city's steps. Indoors, Byzantine mosaics shattered the streaming white light into stabs of dandelion yellow, blood, emerald, and midnight blue. Paintings glistened with the burnished metals and translucent glazes evolved by Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano...
...Giovanni breathed in all this brightness and richness like the air, and almost as naturally began painting pictures of his own. Now, in a handsome book to be published next week (Giovanni Bellini, Phaidon, Oxford; $6.50), a large part of Bellini's work has been spread out for those who want to see the dawn of the Renaissance in Venice...
...Giovanni, each Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Pieta, martyred saint, and lay portrait was an essay on nature as well as on man. He organized his pictures with the care of a conscientious gardener, planting every detail where it would have room to grow and impress itself on the eye. Light was all-important in his best works; he fixed its color and quality precisely enough to show the weather and the time of day. But the light said even more: he made it a link between people and landscapes. In paintings like Saint Francis (see cut), the painted light seems...
...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...
...Cardinal-Bishop of Porto when Cesare was born, became Pope Alexander VI in 1492. Other children (all by Mistress Vannozza Cattani): Giovanni, Lucrezia, Goffredo...