Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini - family competitions

Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini - family competitions

One of the things we haven't discussed with regard to the Presentation in the Temple paintings by Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini is that they represent a competition between the two artists. Since Giovanni Bellini grows up in the household of Jacopo Bellini, even though he is not his son but his half-brother, (see other blog entries and Maze's article) he has had a painting teacher from the age of three. Jacopo Bellini was trained in Florence and elsewhere by
Gentile da Fabriano, (after whom he names his real son) and he is in Florence when artists like Masaccio and Donatello are beginning their careers. As we have said, Jacopo keeps a notebook of drawings that include his own ideas about compositions for various Biblical subjects, particularly from the Life of Christ, and one of them is the Presentation in the Temple.

Jacopo Bellini's version of the Presentation in the Temple does not look like the half-figural representations of Mantegna and Giovanni. It looks like many of the other drawings in Jacopo's notebook, architectural stage sets on which small, full-length figures are placed in large open spaces to represent the Biblical stories.

Often the protagonists in the drama are in the background, as they are here,
and are hardly visible. But Jacopo in his notebook has worked up a repertoire of possible subjects for paintings in order to teach pupils about the Christian subjects they will be required perhaps to paint in the course of their careers.
Though his Presentation scene doesn't look anything like the panels painted by Mantegna and Bellini, the idea for the Presentation in the Temple as a subject still might have come from the master in the "school," Jacopo himself, the half-brother of Giovanni Bellini and the father-in-law of Mantegna. Jacopo had been part of Gentile da Fabriano's workshop in Florence, and when he returns to Venice in 1424, he sets up his own workshop. Since by 1429 he is in charge of two young boys, his own son, Gentile, and his father's son, Giovanni, he intends for them to eventually work for him and probably takes on the role of art teacher for them. When Mantegna joins the family in 1453 by marrying Jacopo's daughter, he, too, at age 22, is probably regarded by Jacopo as another artist to nurture and teach.
         Jacopo keeps all his life the notebooks we have referred to in other blog entries (now in the Louvre and British Library) where he makes drawings of the subjects he thinks an artist might be called upon to paint; he sketches outlines of scenes and dramas of stories from the Bible, and it is not hard to imagine that his notebooks are used in his workshop as teaching tools for younger artists, namely for his half-brother, his son, and his son-in-law. His sketchbooks were considered so valuable to the family that he passes them down to his son, and when Gentile writes his will in 1507, he wills them to Giovanni.
         When Jacopo was in Florence, the Baptistery competition where Ghiberti and Brunelleschi produced these trial bas-reliefs had already taken place,

and Jacopo would have seen Della Robbia and Donatello competing in the Cantoria commission, Ghiberti and Brunelleschi competing for the Cupola, and Gentile da Fabriano, his mentor, competing with Lorenzo di Monaco in painting The Adoration of the Magi into altarpieces, Monaco for the church of Sant'Egidio in 1422, Fabriano for the Strozzi chapel in Santa Trinita, in 1423.
 

These altarpieces, both in the Uffizi now, are similar sizes, with three rounded arches in the frame and the procession of the kings moving toward the left-hand figures of Mary, Joseph, and the baby.
 







              

Gentile da Fabriano, 1423, Magi                            Lorenzo Monaco, 1422, Magi

The stimulation that came from competition among these artists must have been witnessed by Jacopo and will have encouraged him to use competition when he taught his own pupils. He would have understood how competition encouraged those artists to create their best work.  If we look at the subjects painted by Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, they are often the same subjects found in Jacopo Bellini's notebooks. It seems reasonable to assume that part of Jacopo's teaching technique was to get his wards/students to try their hand at the same thing, to compete with each other to learn.      
        Not surprising, then, that Jacopo's most talented students often paint similar subjects, sometimes at similar times. I will make a partial list of subjects painted by both Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini in another blog to show the rivalry that existed between the two artists; even some subjects tackled by one early in his career will be attempted later in the other's. And Gentile Bellini should not be considered outside this realm of competition. Now that scholars understand that Gentile was younger than Giovanni and older than Mantegna, his body of work will have to be reevaluated as well.
       Let us examine several of the possible competition paintings between Mantegna and Giovanni. Certainly one of the earliest would have to be the
Presentation panels we have discussed at length, carried out in 1454. Isn't it possible that these are suggested by Jacopo as a possible competition subject for these two men when Jacopo's first grandchild is born in 1454?
         Since drawings were copied from Mantegna to Bellini for the figures of the Madonna and Child, Joseph, and high priest in these panels, as well as parts of the figure of Nicolosia, (see the catalogue for the London show, 2018) it is clear that drawings are important for the underpinnings of the works. Jacopo's training in Florence would have emphasized the need for drawings in preparation for painting, and the contours of the figures in both Mantegna and Bellini's paintings respect the notion of "disegno" that was characteristic of Florence of the 1400's, when and where Jacopo was taught.
         In 1453 when Mantegna joins the Bellini family in 1453 by marrying the
niece of Giovanni Bellini, Jacopo's daughter, Nicolosia, Mantegna is entering a family where the teaching of painting has been the primary concern of the elder Bellini for the care of his half-brother, Giovanni, and for the care of his own son, three years younger than Giovanni, Gentile. And while Mantegna does not follow all of Jacopo's precepts for his painting, Mantegna's use of tempera paint rather than oil and his emphasis on "disegno" in all of his works are things for which Jacopo must have respected him. Giovanni Bellini, on the other hand, does not typically do preparatory drawings as Jacopo had but rather usually draws or paints directly onto the surface of the panel before painting in oil, not tempera. In some ways, then, Mantegna is more conservative and closer to Jacopo's tradition than Giovanni, but they both are stimulated by the proposals and experiences of father-in-law and half-brother, Jacopo.
      
Predictably we find an Adoration of the Magi in Jacopo's notebook sketches, in fact, two:

 

An Adoration of the Magi that repeats the formula shown in Jacopo's notebooks

is now in Ferrara's Pinacoteca:

Is this painting by the teacher or one of his pupils?

We know that Mantegna paints the Adoration of the Magi later, in a triptych in the Uffizi.

The composition is not exactly like Jacopo's, but he prefers to give a landscape setting, as he usually does, for the Magi and their entourage curving down a path toward the child.

And a smaller panel exists with larger figures (half-length, like the Presentation panel) now held by the Getty, in which we find the Three Magi and Mary, Joseph and the baby.

This panel has been attributed to Mantegna, but Mantegna, like Jacopo, liked to conceive of his paintings with a stage set, and these are more like the portraits painted by Giovanni Bellini, which would tempt us to think Giovanni is trying a subject suggested by Jacopo again in rivalry with Mantegna. But the emphasis on feelings usually seen in Giovanni's work seems absent in this panel, and it raises the question about whether this version of the Adoration of the Magi might not be by Gentile, with some help from Giovanni in the painting of the vase holding the gold coins.

 

The Getty's attribution of this panel to Mantegna, at any rate, needs to be reexamined. 

Many years before Mantegna paints his Adoration of the Magi triptych, he is competing with Giovanni Bellini in another subject, as you might now guess, also found in the notebooks of Jacopo: the Agony in the Garden or the Garden at Gethsemane.


In Jacopo's Agony Christ kneels on the left in a striated landscape and in the distance we see a city. The three disciples occupy the foreground and middle ground, stretched out, asleep. The luck that Jacopo's composition is extant in his notebooks allows viewers to see how much indebted both Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini are to Jacopo's idea for this subject.
And both Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini paint panels of the Agony in the Garden that have also survived and hang near one another normally in the National Gallery in London now so that viewers can compare them.

Competition between Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini produces beautiful works, in the Presentation in the Temple paintings, which we have seen, and in these two panels with the Agony in the Garden.
 

The dates usually given these Agony paintings is c.1455, which seems plausible since it would be one year after the competition panels of the Presentation, (see our blog entry on those and their date of 1454), a time before Mantegna was working on the San Zeno altarpiece 1457-60 in Verona and before he had to go back to Padua to finish the Ovetari chapel in 1457, and a time before Giovanni has taken up residence in 1459 in the zone of San Lio in Venice away from Jacopo's workshop. (see Maze)
        The Agony in the Garden paintings have similarities to each other and also to Jacopo's composition of the subject, but they also showcase the differences between Mantegna and his wife's uncle.

 

Unlike in these photo images, they are roughly the same size and shape.  They are also both painted in tempera on panel, unusual for Giovanni. We do not know of a commission for these works, so could they be teaching moments for Jacopo

and his students?

Mantegna's Agony in the Garden on the left, shows Christ kneeling in prayer towards naked child angels who carry the symbols of his later torture, while in the foreground sleep the three disciples who accompanied him to the Garden, Peter, John, and James.

Over on the right in the background we see the walls and towers of Jerusalem and the Roman soldiers coming to arrest Christ with Judas, his betrayer, leading the way under the dark bird of bad omens. 

 

Almost as if he knows his work will be compared to another artist's and that he must make sure viewers know he is the one who has completed this one,  Mantegna places his signature in Latin on the rocks beneath Christ (scroll laterally to see the whole of it):
OPUS ANDREAE MANTEGNA

 

Mantegna is proud of his painting and his skill at foreshortening; he pushes the foreshortened disciples lying on the ground to the front of the picture plane and foreshortens also their haloes, as if to exhibit his ability to make figures look realistic.

He is also proud of how he paints architecture so the city of Jerusalem with edifices resembling the Colosseum and Trajan's Column is enlarged to three-quarters of the picture plane. The buildings that make the viewer think of Rome reveal Mantegna's close study of ancient buildings and ruins in Rome and Northern Italy (he even paints the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on top of the column.) Since Jerusalem was under Roman rule when Christ was arrested, it made historical sense to Mantegna to paint his Jerusalem like a miniature Rome.

Everything about Mantegna's Agony is hard-edged and clear, with sharp contours and stony surfaces, and not just in the building sections.

The cloth of the disciples' gowns is painted in ridges similar to the stony ridges in the landscape around them. The pink gown of James is the same color as the city walls.

In Giovanni Bellini's Agony in the Garden Christ faces in the opposite way and kneels towards a single angel in the sky holding a chalice, the bitter "cup" Jesus asks God to take away from him as he is praying. The disciples are asleep in the foreground, as in Mantegna's, Jerusalem appears in the distance on the hill, and the Roman soldiers with Judas are depicted in the middle ground, as in Mantegna's.


While a sense of urgency appears in both, Bellini's pink dawn in the sky of his vast landscape makes us feel the end of Jesus' difficult night and gives a reason
for the disciples to have fallen asleep, but the rose dawn suggests a new hope as well.
 

The Agony in the Garden as an event takes place in the Bible right after the Last Supper. Jesus has known at that supper that Judas will betray him; he announces it at the table.
Judas leaves and accepts 30 shekels of silver from the Roman soldiers for the information as to Christ's whereabouts. The "good" disciples accompany Christ after the meal to a garden where Christ sets himself apart from them to pray.


The disciples are human and fall asleep while Christ wrestles with the knowledge that he will be arrested, tortured, crucified, and buried. The scene shows the viewer Christ's understanding of his own death and his own asking God to be allowed to forego the horror.

In Mantegna's scene we are made aware that soon he will be found and captured.
The anxiety of his arrest is compounded by the artist in his tracing out for the viewer the path the soldiers will follow around the hill to the sleeping men and up the stone stairs to the praying Christ.

The soldiers appear close and on the move. Even the rabbits on the path will be scattered in the coming tumultuous encounter. All the obstacles that Mantegna puts in the soldiers' way, the rabbits, wooden bridge, disciples legs, will soon be pushed past in the next moment of the onrush.
The sky reflects the ominous nature of the next moment, as does the black bird.

In Bellini's scene we know he will be captured, but the soldiers seem further away

and the brilliant light in the sky appeases the anxiety of the viewer with its beauty. God's plan for Christ seems less imminent and less hazardous in Bellini.
Bellini places steps in his painting, too, but they follow the curve of the beautiful Venetian bridge over the canal waterway and are so small they seem much further away.
Even the city appears high on a hill in the distance.
 
The viewer is allowed to imagine that Christ and his disciples might have time to gather their belongings and get away from the Romans.

The pink light of dawn subdues the worry with a sense that God's plan will be for the good in the end.

Bellini's landscape is all inclusive to suggest that Christ's story is part of a larger history, not the individual story of a specific city as it is in Mantegna. The bigger ideas of fate and the range of human frailty come across the path over the bridge in Bellini. We are swept away as viewers in his scene by the height and loveliness of his dawn light beyond Christ's kneeling figure.

 





 
Mantegna's gang of putti wielding instruments of torture offer no redemption.


 Bellini's God offers the cup of hardship from a sweet-faced baby boy. 
 
Mantegna wants us to feel the agony in the scene.

Bellini knows that the world may have evil but that the greater picture of human history is one of love.

         

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.