Giovanni Bellini was also known as Giambellino. He is one of the greatest Italian painters of all time and he is the main representative of the Venetian Quattrocento.
He came from a family of painters and he took his first steps in his trade and art in his father’s studio. We can find in Giovanni Bellini’s work his father and his brother-in-law’s influence. Jacopo Bellini was his father, and his brother-in-law’s name was Andrea Mantegna, who got married to Giovanni Bellini’s sister Niccolosia in 1453.
From 1460 onwards he receives the influence of Piero della Francesca and he leaves the Gothic style to be centred in a synthesis of colour and form and in the unification of objects and figured beings in the same space (Coronation of the Virgin, 1473). It was then when he met Antonello da Messina whose prevalence of the light had an influence in Bellini.
In 1479 Bellini painted the frescoes of the Venetian Palazzo Ducale (It was destroyed by a fire in 1577).
Bellini’s work is characterized by a perfect dominion of the sense of space and the effects of the light, synthesized with a great spirituality into the one he arrives to in some cases thanks to an impressive expressiveness (i.e. Crucifixion).
His main disciples were Giorgione, Tiziano and Sebastiano Del Piombo.
