1. Jacopo Bellini. When Gentile da Fabriano, one of the most refined and accomplished of the religious painters of the Umbrian Apennines, came to practise at Venice, where art was backward, several young men of the city took service under him as pupils. Among these were Giovanni and Antonio of Murano, and Jacopo Bellini. The Umbrian master left Venice for Florence in 1422, and the two brothers of Murano stayed behind and presently founded a school of their own. (See Vivaeini.) But Jacopo Bellini followed his teacher to Florence in the capacity of famulus. It was the time when a new spirit had just broken out in Florentine art, and when the leaders of that school—Ghiberti and Donatello, Andrea del Castagno, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio—had made immense progress in many ways at once,—in the sciences of anatomy and perspective, in classical grace and style, in the truth and sincerity of nature,—so that from them the young Venetian found much more to learn than even from his Umbrian teacher as to the possible perfections of the art. The little evidence left us proves that he made good use of his opportunities. But his works are as rare as the events of his life, after his service in Florence with Gentile da Fabriano, are uncertain. That service presently got him into trouble. The Umbrian, as a stranger coming to paint in Florence, was jealously looked on. One day a group of young Florentines took to throwing stones into his shop, and the Venetian pupil ran out and put them to flight with his fists. Thinking this might be turned against him, he went and took service on board the galleys of the Florentine state; but, returning after a year, he found he had in his absence been tried for assault and condemned in a heavy fine. He was arrested and put in prison, but the matter was afterwards compromised upon a public act of penance to which Jacopo submitted. Whether he accompanied his master to Rome in 1426 we cannot tell, but there is evidence to show that he was practising on his own account in Venice in 1430, and probably as soon as 1427. Neither can we fix the date of his marriage; but it was probably about the time of his return to his native state, for we know that he had grandchildren before 1458. The remainder of his life was spent between Venice, Verona, and Padua. At Venice, besides other work, he painted a great series from the lives of Christ and the Virgin in the church of St John the Evangelist. This has entirely perished. In the cathedral of Verona there was, until it was destroyed by the barbarism of the 18th century, an important Crucifixion from his hand. In the archbishop’s palace of the same city another Crucifixion still remains, but greatly injured. At Padua Jacopo appears to have lived several years, and to have founded there a school which became the rival of the school of Squarcione. There his sons, Gentile and Giovanni, grew up; there his daughter Niccolosia found a husband in Andrea Mantegna, the most famous of the scholars of Squarcione. (See Mantegna.) In Jacopo Bellini the Venetian school had not yet found its special and characteristic manner. But he holds a position of great importance, as having been the first to fertilize Venetian soil with the science and genius of Florence. From no extant pictures of his can his manner be judged so well as from the book of his sketches, which has become the property of the British Museum. This, in spite of fading and decay, is a unique and invaluable possession, containing a vast number of original studies tinted or drawn with pen or ink, and including compositions from Scripture and the lives of the saints, from classical fable, and from natural history in surprising variety.

2. Gentile Bellini was the elder of the two sons of Jacopo. To the precise date of his birth we have no clue. Both he and his brother Giovanni served together under their father Jacopo as his pupils as long as he lived. After his death each of them practised his art independently in their native city; but a warm and unbroken affection is recorded to have always subsisted between the brothers. In 1464 Gentile was commissioned to paint the doors of the great organ in St Mark’s with figures of the four saints—Mark, Jerome, Theodore, and Francis. The next year he painted for the church of Sta Maria dell’ Orto a picture of the apotheosis of Lorenzo Giustiniani, patriarch of Venice. From 1465 until 1474 we cannot trace his occupations with precision, though there are several extant works that can be assigned to the interval. On the 21st of September 1474, he was appointed to restore and renew the existing painted decorations in the hall of the Great Council in the Ducal Palace. These were in part frescoes, the work of his father’s master, Gentile da Fabriano. Some of them Gentile Bellini restored, and some were so ruined that he had to destroy them and put in their place new work of his own. The practice of painting in oil upon canvas had lately been brought to Venice by Antonello of Messina. The new medium, besides yielding richer effects, resisted damp and salt better than the old; and all the painters of Venice were eagerly learning its use. Gentile adopted it in the hall of the Great Council. In 1479 the Sultan Mahomet sent word to the Signoria of Venice that he desired the services at Constantinople of a good painter of their state, at the same time inviting the doge to the wedding of his son. The doge declined to go, but the Signoria chose Gentile Bellini to be sent with two assistants at the expense of the state and to paint for the Turk, first electing his younger brother Giovanni to fill his place in the works at the Ducal Palace until he should return. He was admirably received, and painted the portraits of the sultan and many of his officers, besides that picture of the reception of a Venetian embassy by the grand vizier which is now at the Louvre (No. 68). It is a well-known and doubtful story how the sultan alleged that a picture of Gentile’s showed an imperfect knowledge of the appearance of the muscles of the neck after decapitation, and to convince the painter had a slave decapitated in his presence, and how this made Gentile uncomfortable and anxious to get away. He returned at the end of 1480, bringing gifts and honours; and from that time he and Giovanni were engaged together for the state on the decoration of the great hall· Gentile painted there four great subjects from the story of Barbarossa, which unhappily perished in the fire of 1577. It is recorded that in 1486 the young Titian entered his workshop as a pupil. Three of the most important of his works date from the last five or six years of the century, and were done for the school of St John the Evangelist at Venice. They represent the cure of a sick Venetian by a relic of the cross, the procession in honour of the same relic in the piazza of St Mark, and the miracle of the recovery of the relic from the Grand Canal (Academy of Venice, Nos. 543, 555, 529). In 1506 Gentile was so busy as to write that he could not accept a commission proposed by Francesco, marquis of Mantua. The next winter he fell sick, and made his will, bequeathing his father’s sketch-book above described to his brother John, on condition that the brother should finish the picture of the Sermon of St Mark which the sick man had then on hand. He died on the 23d of February 1507. It is by his science and spirit in the treatment of animated and dignified processional groups, with many figures and architecture of masterly perspective, that we chiefly know Gentile Bellini. He is a workman of infinite precision, and a fine colourist, though his manner has some of the hardness of the earlier times. To conduct the school of Venice to its final liberty and splendour was the work of his younger brother, the great

3. Giovanni Bellini. His birth it is no less impossible to fix with accuracy than that of his brother. His earliest work, done at Padua, shows strongly the stern influence of his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna. The National Gallery has a Christ on the Mount, painted by Giovanni, probably about 1455, and apparently in direct competition with a picture of the same subject by Mantegna himself, similarly conceived, which belongs to the Baring Gallery. The characteristics of the style formed at Padua by Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, and maintained by the former all his life, are a great intensity and vehemence of expression, an iron severity and unmatched firmness and strength of draughtsmanship; a tendency, in draperies, to imitate the qualities of sculpture; a love of the difficulties of perspective; a leaning towards the antique, which these masters learned to transform and reanimate with a more passionate energy and an austerer strength of their own. Of the two, Bellini is always the more reserved and simple, the more inclined to work from nature and the less from the antique, and he has the richer choice in colour; but there are works in which they are indistinguishable. The period when Bellini paiuted in this first manner and in tempera may be roughly fixed (though there is often great uncertainy as to the dates of his pieces, and though at all times he seems occasionally to have recurred to his early practice) between 1455 and. 1472. It is probable that the famous picture of the Circumcision now at Castle Howard, which was repeated more than once by the master himself, and many times over by his pupils and assistants, was painted before this date. The altar pieces on a great scale, which are the noblest monument of his middle period, were certainly painted after it. Of these the chief were the Virgin and Saints, in a chapel of the church of Saints Giovanni and Paolo at Venice, which perished along with Titian’s Peter Martyr in the fatal fire of 1867; a great Coronation of the Virgin, in the church of St Dominic at Pesaro; a Transfiguration, now in the museum of Naples; a Virgin and Saints, painted for the church of S. Giobbe, now in the Academy at Venice (No. 36). These, and the multitude of Madonnas and other devotional pictures painted by Giovanni Bellini during the thirty years following his change of manner and adoption of the oil medium, are among the noblest products of the religious art of the world. They stand alone in their union of splendour with solemnity; they have the manful energy of Mantegna without his harshness, and the richness of Giorgione without his luxury. Succeeding pictures show an increase of this richness, and a character more nearly tender. An altar piece, painted for the church of San Zaccaria, seems to indicate a transition, and that the venerable master is acquiring all the softer splendour and keeping pace with Giorgione and Titian, the young pupils of the school. Nay, at the very close of his career, Bellini left the old devotional cycle in which he had produced works so moving and august, and painted for Alphonso of Ferrara a mythology in the most gorgeous manner of the ripe Venetian school. This is the Feast of the Gods, now at Alnwick Castle, a picture to which Titian set the finishing touches, and to which the companion, by Titian himself, is now at Madrid. Bellini died on the 29 th of November 1516, full of years and honours. We have seen that he was associated with his brother in the decoration of the Great Hall of the Council in 1479. In 1483 he was appointed Pittore del Dominio, and exempted from the charges of his guild. All the painters of the state at one time or another were associated with him or passed through his school. Among the most distinguished of his scholars and assistants who will not need separate mention, we may name Marco Basaiti and Vincenzo Catena, many of whose works pass for their master’s. He was the honoured associate of statesmen and men of letters. In 1506, when Albert Dürer visited Venice, where he was subject to some annoyances, he found the noble old man not only the most courteous of the Venetian artists in his reception of a stranger, but the best in his profession (“der best im gemeU ”).

Many pictures in various galleries pass as portraits of one or other of the Bellini. But of those that are styled likenesses of Giovanni, none can be proved authentic, while the only certain portrait of Gentile is a medal by Camelio. (Vasari, ed. Lemonnier, vol. v. pp. 1-28; Sansovino, Ven. descr., 125, seq.; Ridolfi, £ 90-99; Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in North Italy, vol. £ pp. 100-193.) (s. c.)

BELLINI, Lorenzo, physician and anatomist, was born at Florence in 1643. After completing his studies in general literature he went to Pisa, where, assisted by the generosity of the grand duke Ferdinand IL, he studied under two of the most learned men of that age, Oliva and Borelli, the former of whom instructed him in natural philosophy and the latter in mechanics. He likewise studied medicine under Redi, and mathematics under Marchetti. At the early age of twenty he was chosen professor of philosophy at Pisa, but did not long continue in this office; for he had acquired such a reputation for skill in anatomy, that the grand duke procured him a professorship in that science, and was himself a frequent auditor at his lectures. After a long residence in Pisa, he was invited to Florence and appointed physician to the grand duke Cosmo. He was also made senior consulting physician to Pope Clement XI. Bellini died in 1703, in the sixtieth year of his age. His works were published in a collected form in 1708 (2 vols. 4to), and reprinted in 1732.

BELLINI, Vincenzo, one of the most celebrated operatic composers of the modern Italian school, was born at Catania in Sicily, November 3, 1802. He was descended from a family of musicians, both his father and grandfather having been composers of some reputation. After having received his preparatory musical education at home, he entered the conservatoire of Naples, where he studied singing and composition under Tritto and Zingarelli. He soon began to write pieces for various instruments, as well as a cantata and several masses and other sacred compositions. His first opera, Adelson e Savina, was performed in 1824 at a small theatre of Naples; his second dramatic work, Bidnca e Fernando, saw the light two years later at the San Carlo theatre of the same city, and made his name known in Italy. His next work, Il Pirata, was written for the celebrated Scala theatre in Milan, to words by Felice Romano, with whom Bellini formed a union of friendship to be severed only by his death. The splendid rendering of the music by Tamburini, Rubini, and other great Italian singers, contributed greatly to the success of the work, which at once established the European reputation of its composer. Almost every year of the short remainder of his life witnessed the production of a new operatic work, each of which was received with rapture by the audiences of France, Italy, Germany, and England, and some of which retain their place on the stage up to the present day. We mention the names and dates of four of Bellini’s operas familiar to most lovers of modern Italian music, viz. :— I Montecchi e Capuleti (1829), in which the part of Romeo has been a favourite with all the great contraltos of the last seventy years; La Sonnambula (1831); Norma, Bellini’s best and most popular creation (1832), and I Puritani (1834), written for the Italian opera in Paris, and to some extent under the influence of French music. In 1833 Bellini had left his country to accompany to England the great singer Pasta, who had created the part of his Sonnambula. In 1834 he accepted an invitation to write an opera for the national Grand Opera in Paris. While he was carefully studying the French language and the cadence of French verse for the purpose, he was seized with a sudden illness and died at his villa in Puteaux near Paris, September 21, 1835. This unexpected interruption of a career so brilliant sheds, as it were, a gloom of sadness over the whole of Bellini’s life, a sadness which, moreover, was foreshadowed by the character of his works. His operatic creations are throughout replete with a spirit of gentle melancholy, frequently monotonous and almost always undramatic, but at the same time irresistibly sweet, and almost disarming the stern demands of higher criticism which otherwise would be compelled to reprove the absence of both dramatic vigour and musical depth. To the feature just mentioned, combined with a rich flow of cantilena, Bellini’s operas owe their popularity, and will owe it as long as the audiences of our large theatres are willing to tolerate outrages on rhyme and reason if sung by a beautiful voice to a pleasing tune. In so far, however, as the defects of Bellini’s style are characteristic of the school to which he belongs, they fall to be considered in a general treatment of the whole subject. See Music.