Date: 24-04-2005
Owning Institution: Pinacoteca di Brera
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Renaissance        

Tomorrow is the feast day of St Mark, so this week’s picture is St Mark Preaching in Alexandria. It was originally commissioned from Gentile Bellini by the Venetian confraternity of the Scuola di San Marco in May 1504, but not quite finished when the artist died, nearly three years later, in February 1507. In his last testament, Gentile requested that his “very dear brother” Giovanni Bellini complete the work; and bequeathed to him, by way of recompense, a precious album of drawings by their father, Jacopo Bellini. On completion, this colossal canvas hung in the Scuola di San Marco for three centuries, but is now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, in Milan.

Giovanni Bellini’s contribution to the work appears to have been limited. His hand can be detected principally in the subtle transitions between light and shade in the picture, as well as in its dramatic sky. Giovanni has long been considered a greater artist than his brother, deeper and more mystical in temperament, as well as a more skilled and sensitive painter of emotion and atmosphere. But in Renaissance Venice, Gentile was every bit as famous as his younger sibling. He specialised in panoramic group scenes like the one reproduced here, full of detail and enlivened by numerous small touches of actuality, such as exotic costumes and architecture. Most of his large-scale paintings have been destroyed by fire – always hard to contain in Venice, with its tightly clustered buildings – but they won him great renown in his own lifetime.

Often set in faraway places, Gentile Bellini’s works appealed to the perennial Venetian spirit of wanderlust. They were pictures painted for a people curious about other cultures, with eclectic tastes in clothes, art and building styles alike – a people always on the lookout for new objects and ideas to trade and exchange. The act of looking at a work like St Mark Preaching in Alexandria was intended, I suspect, to be a literally transporting experience, like travelling to a distant place purely through your eyes. Because of the scale of the picture, when you stand in front of it you feel as if you can almost just step into the scene.

Bellini’s Alexandria is a city of minarets and towers which has also been given an undeniably Venetian flavour. St Mark, who lived in Alexandria around the middle of the first century A.D., is shown preaching in a piazza very much like St Mark’s Square in Venice. The large religious building that forms the backdrop to the scene is plainly modelled, not on the modest church in Alexandria that bears the evangelist’s name, but on the basilica of St Mark in Venice. Certain elements of its exterior decoration, like the triads of round-headed arches and the many marble tondi that enliven its surface, are derived from the late fifteenth-century façade of the Scuola di San Marco – the building for which the painting was originally destined. This was presumably the painter’s way of symbolising St Mark’s special relationship with Venice. His position as  the city’s patron saint had been cemented in the ninth century, when a pair of enterprising Venetian merchants had stolen the bones from his tomb in Alexandria, cunningly hiding them in a barrel of pork to put Muslim customs officials off the scent. Bellini, likewise, appropriates the saint for his home town by painting Alexandria as a hybridised version of Venice itself.

St Mark stands to preach on a stone pulpit rather like one of the many bridges that criss-cross Venice’s canals. Behind him a bearded scribe in a pink robe and Bedouin headgear records his words on a parchment scroll. He is Anianus, a shoemaker whom Mark miraculously healed and converted to Christianity. Nearby stands an orderly crowd of Venetians, many of whom are probably portraits of the various members of the confraternity of the Scuola di San Marco. Gentile Bellini has included himself among their number, standing in the foreground next to the pulpit wearing a red robe and black beret. He is easily identified, because he wears the gold chain and medal given to him by Sultan Mehmed II, at whose court he had spent two years between 1479 and 1480. That sojourn was the only adventure of Bellini’s otherwise stay-at-home life. On one occasion, when the artist presented his royal patron with a depiction of St John the Baptist’s severed head, the Sultan is said to have found the work unconvincing – and to have had a slave decapitated there and then to prove his point. The painter returned to Venice soon afterwards.

Much of St Mark Preaching in Alexandria seems to have been based on Bellini’s memories of Constantinople – details of life in one Muslim city, so to speak, grafted on to this fantasy vision of another. Directly in front of the preaching saint, a group of oriental women wearing pyramidal white mantles kneel on prayer mats. Male, turbaned Muslims mill about the piazza, paying varying degrees of attention to the evangelist who would convert them. In the background, one man struggles with a recalcitrant camel, while another leads a giraffe on a necessarily long rein. This last detail is an authentic slice of life in Alexandria, in that it was directly transcribed by Bellini from a drawing of an African giraffe in the margin of a manuscript written by that great early fifteenth-century traveller, Cyriacus of Ancona, recounting his visits to Alexandria between 1412 and 1414. Bellini’s brother-in-law, the artist and antiquarian Andrea Mantegna, owned a copy of that manuscript, and must have shown it to Bellini when he heard he was painting a picture of Alexandria.

From the same source, Bellini knew that Alexandria was famous for the so-called Column of Diocletian, but he did not know what it looked like so he simply invented it, in the form of the monolithic column beyond the city walls to the right of the scene. Another landmark of the city that he had read about was a great granite obelisk that had been brought there from the Temple of Amon by Emperor Augustus. That is why he included an obelisk next to the church at the left of the scene. He has added the prominent inscription “VL” to its base. This may have been Bellini’s abbreviation for “Vivente Loredano”, meaning that his picture was painted “while Loredan was alive” – a reference to Doge Leonardo Loredan, whose portrait, by Gentile’s brother Giovanni Bellini, is one of the treasures of the National Gallery. These days, incidentally, the original of the great marble obelisk taken by Augustus to Alexandria is to be found in New York’s Central Park.