Customer Reviews

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting (National Gallery of Art, Washington)

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This remarkable show (and catalogue) is a summary of Venetian painting from 1500 to 1530, allowing a side by side comparison of the work of Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian in what was one of Venice's astonishing high water marks of artistic creativity.

Once you have been bitten by the bug, these paintings are with you for good. Seeing this work firsthand, one can't help be seduced by the ravishing, luminous beauty light and layers of glazing that makes these paintings unique. The stillness in some of these works suggest the real subject here is light and color -- something these Venetians seem to have captured like no other group of artists.

The reproductions in the catalogue are quite good, and there are a very generous amount of close detail shots of the paintings too -- something particularly useful in illustrating the intricacy of detail in Giorgione's work. The essays are interesting, but my favorite is one I almost missed after the technical photographs of xrays in the back: an essay which describes how the Venetian painters were at a remarkable crossroads of shared experimentation in color including glassmakers, creators of fabric dyes, and other tradesmen that contributed to a new world of color effects in paint. For example the painters would use finely ground glass mixed into the oils to give the glazes a more bright, refractory quality.

This is a captivating show and a great catalogue to accompany it.

I personally am very selective when it comes to any art survey volume. An art survey I have found can be either very weak, or very important and powerful, yet rarely anything in-between. In terms of the Italian Renaissance they are rarely on the powerful side as they don't function to serve the key purposes for historians, curators, and collectors. Most importantly surveys rarely clarify the impact of significant artists of a period and their relationship to the bigger realm of art history between their collective works. This is not the case with Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting.

For example, the current exhibition, of the same title, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The rich and informative catalogue by David Allan Brown et al., a publication done in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., focuses on the most intense period of the Renaissance in Venice. The work examines a time when Giorgione, Titian (young at the time,) Sebastiano del Piombo, and Palma Vecchio worked alongside each other, and their lesser known colleagues, each and all in the light of the great Giovanni Bellini. The period which is examined represents the first three decades of the sixteenth century. It also represents a pivotal and major period of visual, and intellectual, impact for Italian art in Italy, Europe, and the world.

Brown et. al. does not handle this exhibition catalogue like a normal, or typical, survey. With 336 p., 9 1/2 x 11 1/2 , 31 halftones + 162 color illus. it is a masterfully planned art volume. Although written in a serious and scholarly manner, a layman will enjoy it.

The volume does not divide up the artists, but looks at their interrelationships. Secular subjects are explored, as are themes of music, love, and time. The leading scholars efforts, along with their detailed entries, provides a solid source for continuing discussion of pictures that are nothing short of monumental.

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting is an exhibition book that is, in my view, well worth obtaining now while available at the publisher price. I see this work as a required addition to any great library on Renaissance art today, and will certainly be valued tomorrow.

A must for the student and lover of the Renaissance and Venice in particular.