Venice at Noontime

When the new French envoy arrived in Venice in 1494 he was given a grand tour of the city. Bug-eyed at Venice's multicolored palaces, its works of art and its citizens' lavish hospitality, he proclaimed it "the most triumphant city I have ever seen."

At the end of the 15th Century, Venice still drew on a great and profitable commerce with the East. Riding the crest of the Renaissance, industrious Venetian artists were turning out more paintings than the artists of any other city in Europe.

Last week 20th Century Venice was a dingy shadow of such glories. But in 16 rooms of the vast Palace of the Doges, now an art museum, Venetians and tourists could get a glimpse of Venice at its noontime brightest.

For eight months the city fathers had been rounding up the works of Giovanni Bellini, long-acknowledged master of 15th Century Venetian art, who once had bishops and nobles competing for his magnificent altarpieces and light-filled portraits, and whose works are now prized by the world's great museums. With 142 of his 180 extant paintings and drawings, collected from all over Europe and the U.S., this is the largest Bellini show ever held. The great polyptych of the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice was painstakingly restored for the occasion.

The exhibition tells the story of a man who almost singlehanded broke the tradition of his time & place, taught Venetian art to loosen its stiff Byzantine and Gothic joints. In his Piet`a with St. John, which shows Mary supporting the body of Jesus while the dazed John stares into the distance, Bellini brought the tightlipped, hot-house Byzantine virgins of earlier Venetian painting out into the clear sunlight of the Italian countryside.

His portraits of well-fed merchant princes and other secular heroes, like the shrewd-eyed, poker-straight Doge Leonardo Loredano, resplendent in gold brocade and carved buttons, registered the pride and self-possession of the Renaissance itself. The work of Bellini's last years, in such paintings as the Toilet of Venus and Feast of the Gods, anticipated the frank delight in the human form which filled the canvasses of his two greatest pupils, Giorgione and Titian.

Unlike restless Leonardo da Vinci, who died a lonely old man far from his native Italy in France, Bellini stuck close to home all his 86 years, was finally buried in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, which as a young man he had helped to decorate. His only recorded complaint against the city that made him wealthy and world famous: its magistrates' insistence that he continue to pay his union dues to the local painters' guild.

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