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In the Spring of 2023, for the first time in France, the Musée Jacquemart-André will pay tribute to the work of the great master Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1435-1516), father of the Venetian School to which his pupils Giorgione and Titian belonged. Giovanni Bellini opened the way to the art of colour and tones that came to be characteristic of the art of the sixteenth century in Venice. 

Through some fifty works from public and private European collections - some of which are presented for the first time - this exhibition highlights the art of Giovanni Bellini and the artistic influences on his pictorial language. By comparing his works with those of his intellectual models, the first exhibition ever devoted to this theme in Europe will show how his artistic language has never ceased to renew itself while developing an undeniable originality. The exhibition will be organised chrono-thematically, with Bellini’s paintings as the common thread, and will be put in dialogue with the ‘models’ that inspired them.

Born into a family of artists, Giovanni Bellini frequented, with his brother Gentile, the studio of their father, Jacopo Bellini, a painter of Gothic training who soon mastered the principles of Florentine Renaissance art. The young artist immersed himself in the art alongside his father, brother and his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, whom his sister Nicolosia had just married. Classicism, sculptural forms, and a good command of Mantegna’s perspective had a great influence on the artist. His work became more monumental as a result of studying the works of Donatello, which were visible in Padua. 

Bellini’s style took a different direction with the arrival in Venice of Antonello da Messina, who joined the Flemish taste for detail with the spatial constructions of the artists of central Italy. From Flemish art, Giovanni borrowed the technique of oil painting, bringing a new aesthetic inflection to his work. The Byzantine art, and more particularly the Byzantine Madonnas, was another source of inspiration for his representations of Virgins with Child. He also developed themes that had been depicted by younger painters, such as topographical landscapes inspired by Cima da Conegliano. Bellini’s latter period was characterised by more vibrant but highly modern strokes. In a unique way, it was the innovations of his best pupils—in particular, Giorgione and Titian—that pushed the older Bellini to reinvent his style.