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Jacopo
Bellini’s eldest son, Gentile (1429-1507), was taught painting in
the
workshop of his father. He had no shortage of commissions, his talent
as
a portraitist revealed itself at an early age. Gentile’s career was
spectacular.
In 1469, he was appointed count palatine by Emperor Frederick III, and
in 1479, at the age of fifty, the Republic of Venice sent him to
Constantinople
to paint the portrait of Sultan Mehmet II:
a great honor. The famous portrait of this oriental monarch, conqueror
of Byzantium, is now in the National Gallery, London. Mehmet “…could
hardly
understand,” wrote Vasari, “… how any mortal could possess the, as it
were,
divine skill of imitating nature so vividly.” Bellini returned, a whole
year later, piled high with gifts and honors, including the title of
“bey”
(knight).
Next to portraiture, Gentile also excelled at large-scale historical
scenes
painted in the style of the early Venetian Renaissance: The
Procession in St. Mark’s Square, dating from 1496, and The
Recovery of the Relic of the True Cross at the Bridge of S. Lorenzo,
dating from c.1500. There is nothing in Venice to equal these panels.
The
faithful and precise rendering of St. Mark’s Square and the medieval
Bridge
of S. Lorenzo makes him the forerunner of Canaletto.
In terms of coloration Gentile remained within the boundaries of
15th-century
traditions. Gentile’s most significant pupil and successor was Carpaccio.
Catarina Cornaro was a Venetian
patrician,
a widow of the Cyprus King Jacob Lusignan. Cyprus was ruled by the
French
house of Lusignan since 1192. After her husband’s death in 1489,
Catarina
abdicated the throne in favor of the Venetian Republic, and lived
thereafter
in Venice.
See: Gentile Bellini. Portrait of
Catarina
Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus.
A Turkish Janissary.
Janissaries
were elite troops of the Sultan, recruited as children from Christian
families,
forcibly converted to Islam and subjected for many years to rigorous
military
and religious training; some had been additionally trained as sappers
and
engineers. Legally they were slaves, in that they enjoyed no personal
rights
outside their regimental life; but they received regular salaries and
were
anything but servile: as recently as 1451 they had staged a near-mutiny
for higher pay, and janissary revolts were to be a regular feature of
Ottoman
history until well into the nineteenth century.
See: Gentile Bellini. A Turkish
Janissary.