Daniel Wallace Maze

This project employs cross-disciplinary methods on a wide range of primary sources to offer a comprehensive history of the Bellini and their workshop, answering longstanding questions and presenting new ones to frame future research. In the 1420s, the painter Jacopo Bellini introduced into Venice the new Renaissance style emerging in artistic centers such as Florence and Padua. Jacopo’s younger half-brother Giovanni profoundly influenced Western art through his mastery of color and atmosphere. Jacopo’s son Gentile became the first de facto official painter of the Republic, which dispatched him to the court of Sultan Mehmet II, whose celebrated portrait in the National Gallery in London is attributed to Gentile. This project provides a rich body of research on Venice’s most important family of artists to enable scholars to assess more accurately the contribution of the Bellini to the Italian Renaissance and of Venetian Renaissance art to the history of Western culture.