These
two paintings, the one on the left by Andrea Mantegna, and the one on
the right by Giovanni Bellini, have been part of a recent show at the
National Gallery in London which will run until 27 January, 2019. Both
paintings have as their ostensible subject the Presentation in the Temple,
the story of Mary and Joseph taking the baby Jesus to be blessed by the
high priest at the altar of the temple. The photos make the paintings look different
sizes here, but they are actually about the same size and oblong, as
you can see from a photo of the two of them displayed in an earlier
exhibit in the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia in Venice in July of 2018.
Both
paintings have in the center Mary leaning on a parapet holding the
child on a cushion, while the high priest with a long white beard,
reaches for the child who is wrapped in swaddling clothes. Joseph
is in the same position in both, the man in the exact center behind Mary
and the high priest.
But,
as T.J. Clark points out in his wonderful analysis of the style
differences between Mantegna and Bellini in the December 20, 2018 issue
of London Review of Books, the painting on the left, Mantegna's, is crisper, more intricate, with harsher outlines and swaddling clothes that look like architectural
elements, and the priest has individually defined curls and a damask
garment that the viewer can feel in texture.
Bellini's image, on the
other hand, Clark describes as having softer contours, with light almost
seeming to illuminate the figures from within; the whole event appears
gentler in Bellini's version as a consequence.
Some
of those effects may be attributed to medium since Mantegna worked in
tempera, a harder-edged egg-based paint, and Bellini worked in oil paint that had
a flexibility and luminosity. But the differences are more than just
the styles of the central figures that appear in both versions. Mantegna
includes three real portraits, one on each side, and Joseph in the
middle. Bellini paints in five real people, two on each side of the main
event, and Joseph, too, the same portrait as in Mantegna's. Why they
painted the same subject with several different portraits is the
question that makes these two paintings fascinating pictorial documents
from the 15th century. The catalogue from the London show makes clear
that Mantegna's outlines for the central figures were used for both paintings, so the two painters are starting from the same base and
Bellini is copying the Mantegna or they are both copying from another
source. What the catalogue gets wrong, and that fact gets repeated by
Clark, unfortunately, is that the curators thought that the Bellini was
done twenty years after the Mantegna.
That cannot possibly be true, as I shall show in this blog entry.
Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) married Nicolosia Bellini in 1453. Because
he is the probable portrait in his own panel, along with his wife, the
child depicted is
probably meant to represent the Christ Child and also their first-born child,
the
first grandchild in the Bellini family, Bernardino (died 1493?) That
would make this panel a presentation of Jesus/Bernardino, with his two
parents, Mary and the high priest, and Joseph, probably a representation
of Jacopo Bellini, Mantegna's father-in-law.
The
self-portrait of Andrea on the far right resembles other self-portraits
attributed to him at different ages, this being the youngest, age 23.
Here
he is again below as an older, idealized soldier on the left in one of his Ovetari
chapel frescoes (from Keith Christiansen in his book, The Genius of
Mantegna):
Here he is as an even older, middle-aged face peeking out of a pilaster decoration in his Camera degli Sposi (1465-74):
long nose with slight bulb at the end of it, bags under his eyes, upper lip area below the nose with a crevice, and no cleft chin.
His hair is treated in much the same way in all as well: fair, short deft curls with bangs on the forehead. (He was recording his own passage through time even before Rembrandt.)
Since Mantegna was born in 1431, he is 23 in the Presentation panel. His wife, however, was probably born before him, in 1427 or so, so she is at least 4 years older, and he may have tried to make himself look older in compensation.
These
two people were married in 1453, so any child born of their official
union would have been about the age of the child in the panel (6-9
months) a year at least after the marriage, i.e., 1454.
Joseph,
or Jacopo Bellini, Nicolosia's father, looks the age Jacopo would have
been in 1454, age 54, since Jacopo Bellini was born in 1400.
Jacopo,
the presumed grandfather, who had probably brokered the marriage for
his daughter, looks positively furious in this painting:
Both
portrait parents of the child look out of the painting into another
space and do not look at each other or at the grandfather. Joseph could certainly be worried about the circumcision of Jesus which
followed with the high priest in the Biblical story, but the portrait
family tension in the scene is palpable, especially if you remove Mary
and the high priest from the panel:
Is Jacopo mad because of the suffering his daughter has undergone in childbirth?
or
is he mad that Mantegna has no intention of staying in Jacopo's
workshop in Venice, as Jacopo might have liked and had perhaps planned,
but wishes to set up his own place of work in Padua and Verona then and
plans to take Nicolosia and the child with him?
The family drama does not end when Giovanni Bellini paints his
own version of the event in the same year, 1454, but Joseph/Jacopo looks
slightly mollified, the high priest looks less angry. 
We know it can only be the same year for several reasons:
1) Jacopo/Joseph is the same exact age in both, 54, and is certainly a portrait of
the grandfather in the family.
2) Every other portrait in Bellini's panel is consistent with the age of a possible family member in 1454, not another year.
3) The baby is the same age, still in swaddling clothes and 6-9 months old.
4) Because of new archival research, the identity of Giovanni Bellini and the rest of the figures can now be understood.
A scholar named Daniel Wallace Maze has written an article in the Fall 2013 issue of Renaissance Quarterly
where he examines the documents and Venetian law that applies to them
for the birthdate of Giovanni Bellini. ("Giovanni Bellini: Birth,
Parentage, and Independence," Vol. 66, no.3, pp. 783-823.) Maze concerns himself more with the archival material than with the art, but he lays out for the reader the
convincing arguments that Giovanni Bellini had to have been born
sometime between 1424 and 1428 and that Giovanni Bellini was Jacopo's
half-brother, not his son, as has been assumed. His analysis would make
Giovanni Bellini the uncle of Gentile Bellini, not his brother, and it
would make Giovanni the uncle of Nicolosia as well.
One
of the interesting things about his research is that it affirms what
Vasari had said in the 1550 Lives about Giovanni Bellini, that the
artist had died at age 90 in 1516. If Giovanni was 90 when he died, he
would have been born in 1426, just within the time period suggested by
the documents that Maze unearthed. In fact, everything Maze discovered
is consistent with the portraits that Giovanni paints into his Presentation in the Temple panel.
From
the left, then, he paints Anna Rinversi, 53, (the mother of Nicolosia
and Gentile Bellini,) the other daughter of Anna and Jacopo, age 20, Mary and Child,
Joseph/Jacopo, age 54, the same age as in Mantegna's panel, the high
priest, and at the right, Gentile Bellini and Giovanni Bellini.
Mantegna and his wife do not appear in Bellini's panel because the panels were probably made for two different families: the Mantegna one for Nicolosia and Mantegna, going off to Padua, the Bellini one for Jacopo's family, including Giovanni, staying in Venice.
Gentile, according to Maze, was born in 1429, so in 1454 he would have been
25,
the age he looks here. If Giovanni was born in 1426, he would have been
three years older than Gentile, so 28 in the panel, which he seems to
be as he looks out at us. (Before scholars thought Gentile and Giovanni
were brothers and
that Gentile was the older, so they could not understand this panel.)
But
what Maze has shown is that Giovanni Bellini was not Gentile's brother
but the brother of Jacopo, and much younger than Jacopo but from the
same father, Nicolo. Nicolo dies, though, when Giovanni is 3, in the
same year that Gentile is born, so Jacopo does the right thing and takes
care of his half-brother who is 26 years younger than he and raises him
with his own son.
In the panel, then, Giovanni is the uncle of
Nicolosia, her sister, and Gentile, and he sees them as much younger than himself. 
What
Maze's research helps us understand for the first time is the odd
disposition of this family. Giovanni is the one painting the second painting,
so he puts himself in the position for the self-portrait of the artist,
over on the right and looking out (see other blog entries on this
subject,) which makes him look slightly displaced from the rest of them,
as is the case from the historical record. Maze shows that Giovanni
sets up residence away from Jacopo in another zone in Venice,
in San Lio rather than San Geminiano, by 1459, soon after this panel is
painted, something he can only have done if he is a separate, emancipated son and not
Jacopo's son. (He would have become emancipated with the death of his father, Nicolo.) The birth of the first grandchild for Jacopo has made
Giovanni realize the original family unit that he is not part of; he is
the black sheep and paints himself as such with dark hair in ringlets.
But as the half-brother of Jacopo and the uncle of Mantegna's wife, her sister, and Gentile, her brother, he has a
responsibility to them, and perhaps a grateful heart that Anna Rinversi
and Jacopo took him in when his own father died. He understands his
half-brother's worry about Nicolosia, so he tones down Jacopo's anger
in his version, and he is fond of Gentile and his sister, so he shows
them both with beautiful faces.
But he knows he was born of a different mother and father, and his dark hair and
eyes
set him apart in the scene. All the people in the panel want the best
for the child who is held by Mary, but perhaps for different reasons.
The holy event in the Bible, where Jesus is presented in the
Temple to
the high priest by his parents, Mary and Joseph, is partly an excuse for
both Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini to present their own views of
their own complicated family ties. These panels serve as photographic documents in an era before photography; the family members want to be able to remember the time when the first grandchild appeared. Everyone is serious because they are
recording their relationship to the new life in the family. Everyone is
serious because they hope the paintings will further their own ties to
the holy idols. The first grandchild changes all the relationships and
both panels are refreshingly honest about the tensions as well as the
tenderness, seen mainly in Mary's embrace of the child in both.
The
hope for a holy and ideal family is never far from the surface in these
exquisite paintings by Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini in 1454.
Only Giovanni is aware he has to look outside the family unit for the comfort he will need.
Another four notes:
The dating of this panel to 1454 rather than 20 years later does bring up one
problem: Giovanni Bellini has used oil paint for the whole of the panel. What that means is that he is using oil on panels and very skillfully for paintings long before Antonello da Messina arrives in Venice in 1475, the traditional date given
for the first use of oil paint in Venice. Why does that pose a problem?
1) If Giovanni Bellini is using oil paint in Venice much before 1475, new sources
other than Antonello might need to be discovered for Giovanni Bellini's adaptation of a Northern medium known from 1434 in the Netherlands.
2) If Giovanni Bellini is painting this well in oil in 1454, and if he is now thought to be born in 1426, then ALL of his paintings need to be reassessed for an earlier
time period which will reform the chronology of his oeuvre.
3) If Giovanni Bellini is painting in oil in 1454, perhaps he is one of the teachers of Antonello about oil and not the other way around. Or perhaps Antonello came
earlier than 1475 to Venice, or perhaps when he did come in 1475 or another earlier time, he and Giovanni were co-conspirators in the new appreciation for oil. Since oil paint is used in Ferrara by Cosimo Tura as early as the 1450's, (see Jill Dunkerton, p.14, vol. 39, National Gallery Technical Bulletin) the history of painting in oil needs to be rethought for this region, and the person beginning the use of it in Venice may have been Giovanni Bellini himself.
4) Since now we can establish that Giovanni Bellini was older than Gentile
and was not technically the brother-in-law of Andrea Mantegna (but rather the
half-uncle of Mantegna's wife,) his relationship with Mantegna needs to be rethought. When people thought he was the younger brother of Gentile, they
naturally thought he was learning from the older Mantegna, but now that he
seems to be five years older than Mantegna, it is more likely that Mantegna is
both learning from him and that they are exchanging ideas as equals. Since Giovanni Bellini was working in the new medium, he appears to be more avant-garde than Mantegna, more experimental; Mantegna is retaining the more traditional tempera medium and preparatory drawing technique associated with his father-in-law, Jacopo Bellini, Giovanni Bellini's brother.
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