Giovanni Bellini
Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1516
(b ?1431-6; d Venice, 29 Nov 1516). Painter and draughtsman, son of (1) Jacopo Bellini. Although the professional needs of his family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting, by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practised in 15th-century Venice. Later, towards the end of his long life, he added the new genres of mythological painting and secular allegory to his repertory of subject-matter. His increasing dominance of Venetian art led to an enormous expansion of his workshop after c. 1490; and this provided the training-ground not only for his numerous shop-hands and imitators (generically known as Belliniani) but probably also for a number of major Venetian painters of the next generation. Throughout his career, Giovanni showed an extraordinary capacity for absorbing a wide range of artistic influences, both from within Venetian tradition and from outside. He also oversaw a technical revolution in the art of painting, involving the gradual abandonment of the traditional Italian use of egg tempera in favour of the technique of oil painting pioneered in the Netherlands. It was thanks to Giovanni Bellini that the Venetian school of painting was transformed during the later 15th century from one mainly of local significance to one with an international reputation. He thus set the stage for the triumphs of Venetian painting in the 16th century and for the central contribution that Venice was to make to the history of European art.
ID: 63527 Portrait of a Young Man 1500 Oil on wood, 31 x 26 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence This work, along with the Portrait of a Young Man conserved in the Galleria Capitolina, is recorded in the Inventories of 1753 as a self portrait, and as such it continues to be regarded, even though this supposition lacks any scientific foundation. The portrait is highly distinctive, the face having a mellow, moulded quality accentuated by its halo of soft curls and the round clouds which fill the sky in the background.Artist:BELLINI, Giovanni Title: Portrait of a Young Man Painted in 1451-1500 , Italian - - painting : portrait
