Mantegna and Bellini - Portraits in their Presentations

Mantegna and Bellini - Portraits in their Presentations
 

Several things were not addressed in the last blog entry on the two panels, Presentation in the Temple, one by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and one by Giovanni Bellini (1426-1516.)
We start with the premise that both panels were painted in 1454 to celebrate the birth of the first grandchild in the family, and we accept that Giovanni Bellini paints himself into his panel at age 28 while Andrea Mantegna was probably around 23 in his panel self-portrait.
In the last blog we did not discuss all of the portraits in depth in Giovanni Bellini's panel. Joseph is certainly Jacopo at age 54, his age in 1454, he having been born in 1400. He is also the same person who is Joseph in both panels, just handled differently by different painters:

We do not have, as far as I know, other portraits of Anna Rinversi and the younger sister of Nicolosia to compare with Bellini's view of them.

But if you put Nicolosia's portrait from Mantegna's panel next to the younger girl in Bellini's Presentation, they cannot be the same person. 

They wear the same headdress and have similar outlines, but the faces are not the same age or the same girl.
Nicolosia is an older girl, with light eyes, lines under her eyes, a small indentation in her chin, as well as a marked crevice between mouth and nose. Her nose is long with a pointed end that bends down.  The sister is younger, has brown eyes, smaller mouth with thinner lips, and a nose that has a slight ski slope effect at the end, that is, turning up with rounded tip, not the sharper point to the nose that can be seen in Nicolosia. The sister has lighter eyebrows and no indentation in her chin. Since no mention is made of any girl other than Nicolosia in Anna Rinversi's will of 1471, this sister must have died between 1454 and 1471. We do not know her name.

Mantegna is not present in Bellini's panel either. If you compare the two younger men on the right in each panel, their features are distinct. Mantegna, as we have
said elsewhere, has a long well-porportioned nose with a small bulb at the tip,
while the figure whom I think is Gentile Bellini shows a very large pointed
nose with wide tip that seems to curve slightly. Though they both have light hair when they are young, we can imagine that Gentile's hair gets darker as he ages because it is already displaying darker sections. His face, too, has a shorter chin and thinner upper lip than that of the Mantegna self-portrait.

Medals were made of both Gentile and Giovanni by Camelio and Gambello in the early 1500's and they are inscribed in Latin with the artists' names.
The medal with the profile of Gentile is very similar to the three-quarter view of him in Giovanni's Presentation:

In older age he has a double chin that has just begun to be visible in his younger years, but his large nose and thin upper lip are still there, and the treatment of the hair is similar. The spaces between the eyebrows, eyelids and cheek, that is, the proportions of the features, are the same, just exaggerated by the sagging of years.

Scholars have suspected that Gentile painted himself into his two paintings done for the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice in 1496. By the time of those two paintings, he would have been 67, considerably older than the portrait done of him by his half-uncle.
Nonetheless, if you flip Gentile's younger face in Giovanni's Presentation panel and put his older face from the preparatory drawing and the finished self-portrait for the Procession of the True Cross side by side with the younger one,

 it is not hard to see that this is the same man at an older stage of life.

They look out in a similar manner, the upper lip is thin in comparison with the lower one, and the peculiar length and shape of the nose, almost as though it has gotten over its ski slope, is treated gently by Giovanni, more realistically by Gentile himself. The hair has darkened and everything has elongated enough to droop but the proportions seem similar enough to me to believe they are the same artist, young and old. 

The same similarity appears if you compare the young Gentile face in the Presentation, when Gentile would have been 25, with the older one in the second of the paintings Gentile did for the Scuola, the Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo, in 1496, when Gentile would have been 67. Gentile kneels among other members of the Scuola to give thanks for the saving of the cross that had fallen into the canal.

 

His hair is dark now, the ski slope has lengthened, but he still has a thin upper lip, small-slit eyes, and pouch under chin. Conclusion:  Giovanni Bellini has

painted his nephew at age 25 into his Presentation Panel in the figure seen second in from the right:

More difficult to compare is the self-portrait of Giovanni Bellini on the far right side of the Presentation panel.

The Gambello medal and Vittore di Matteo (Belliniano)'s image of Giovanni in old age appear to be idealized versions of the artist's profile (perhaps the medal being cut from the Belliniano drawing.) Both are probably carried out after 1500.

 

But neither seems to resemble the figure we take to be the self-portrait in the 

 

Presentation panel of 1454.

The nose points straight out in Belliniano's version, down in Bellini's own version. If Gentile has painted his half-uncle into his Miracle scene next to his
own self-portrait, he has represented Giovanni with more realism, but a ski slope nose is still there, not a Roman one, so more confusion, especially since the
double chin is not present in the Belliniano profile portrait:

Are these the same people, age 28 and age 70? Easier to believe these below are the same man, the Presentation panel portrait and a portrait now in Bergamo in 

the Carrara Gallery, both looking out: 

 

The artist could be presenting himself, half-length, 3/4 view, looking out, in

homage to the Florentine artist who began the self-portrait tradition exactly this way, in both his Brancacci Chapel frescoes and in the panel which is in the Louvre, both dating from 1424-27. Masaccio looks out at the viewer, in 3/4 view and half-length in both.

What begins as Masaccio's signature as a witness to St. Peter's miracle becomes a way for artists to distinguish themselves among groups of people in the scenes they paint. (Donatello also looks out in this panel because he is the sculptor at work in the same chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine.) Artists distinguish themselves as the authors in the work by making visual contact with the viewer.

But why would Giovanni Bellini be interested in a Florentine artist who died in

1428-9? Giovanni's half-brother, Jacopo, the man who trained Giovanni, had

himself been trained in Florence just in the time when the excitement about

Masaccio as an artist was taking place in Florence. Jacopo would have passed on

to both his son, Gentile, and his half-brother, Giovanni, the news about the revolutionary painter who had not only used 1-point perspective for the first time in a painting, but had painted himself into his work looking out at the spectator from that work, making a connection even after death. Giovanni Bellini is aware that if he wishes to paint the family members at the birth of the first grandchild, he will include his half-brother, his stepmother, his two siblings, and himself. Early on this great painter wishes to make the same engagement with the future viewer and to future artists by painting himself in on the right, looking out at us. Just like Masaccio, he lets everyone know who the artist of the work is. His signature is ensured on the document of his family picture. The document is not his contract with the Bellini family, but a contract with artists who follow him.

He appears about to speak, can you hear him?
He even wants us to know how deftly he has absorbed the qualities that make
oil painting magical; like Jan Van Eyck's self-portrait in the London National Gallery,

where the painter includes his own stubble between nose and mouth to make the view of him more realistic,

Giovanni paints with just a few flicks of one paint brush hair the slight hairs starting to grow on his face near his mouth and chin.

Both Van Eyck and Giovanni Bellini know that the new trend for artists is to do their own self-portraits looking out at the viewer and acknowledging the hair that makes them human and male. Alberti felt that painters could magically make the dead seem alive, and certainly that is what Giovanni Bellini's self-portrait in the Presentation does for viewers today. He is so alive his facial hair is starting to grow.