Italian Renaissance Art by Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier

Author:Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

The remarkable power of Giovanni’s light affected his color, even in his earlier works, such as the Agony in the Garden (fig. 5.14) of about 1465. In this picture the extraordinary range of Giovanni’s palette is clear. A remarkable sunrise which affects the entire scene sweeps into the vast space from the background, reflected by the luminous sky above and casting its diffused light into the distance, where we can see a village perched on a mountaintop above a quarry. Such mountain villages and quarries can still be seen today in the hills and mountains near Brescia and Verona (which were then in Venetian territory). It is such pre-Alpine expanses, where marble and sandstone were quarried, that Giovanni must have studied in order to compose such a remarkable picture. The role of color here has a visual profundity and poetic sense of naturalism far removed from the idea of color practiced by the fashionable Florentine painters of this time, who were suggesting that color, applied between the lines, could lend to paintings the beauty and vividness of jewelry. Just as the paintings of Benozzo Gozzoli and Botticelli sparkled like bright stones or colorful tapestries of the past, those of Giovanni Bellini, at the same moment, are imbued with the inevitable optical conclusions to be drawn from the profound unity of light, depth, and form that Masaccio had first proposed.

Figure 5.14 Giovanni Bellini, Agony in the Garden, London, National Gallery.

(© National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.)

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