Bellini and the East at The National Gallery 2006

Date: 16-04-2006
Owning Institution: The National Gallery, London, courtesy the Louvre, Paris
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011  
Subject:       Renaissance    

In 1511 an unknown follower of the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini painted a large canvas now known as The Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus . One of the principal loans secured by the National Gallery for its new exhibition, “Bellini and the East”, this picture – owned by the Louvre in Paris – is no masterpiece but it is a vivid testament to the perennial Venetian spirit of fascinated wanderlust . Painted in the so-called “eyewitness” style originally popularised by Bellini himself, it is not so much a topographical view of a particular corner of the city as an attempt to compress everything that made Damascus so vivid and strange, to Venetian eyes, within the scope of a single canvas: crowds of figures in turbans; a laden camel on its way to the bazaar; the great Mosque; the citadel; the public baths; private houses and their distinctive, lush walled gardens.

A train of Venetians, formally dressed in the customary black gowns and caps of their city’s patrician class, wends its way through the colourful scene, to be greeted by the Mamluk viceroy, seated magisterially on a dais. The picture was almost certainly painted for one of these visitors, as a souvenir – the most likely candidate being a gentleman named Pietro Zen, who is depicted leading the train of Venetian ambassadors. If he did indeed own the work, it would have brought back mixed memories to him. In 1512, following the arrest of a Cypriot spy bearing seditious messages from the Shah of Persia to the Venetian consul in Damascus, Zen’s ambassadorial career was brought to a sudden close. He was accused of treason by the Mamluk sultan and only narrowly escaped with his life. He left Damascus in disgrace, on foot and in chains, accompanied by a military guard.

Most of the works of art assembled in “Bellini and the East”, however apparently serene, slight, or charmingly picturesque, are the fruits of political intrigue or the relics of historical trauma. The exhibition focuses on the clash, contact and interplay between three great civilisations, the Venetian, the Byzantine, and the Turkish, and their three contrasting religions, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam. It sets out to tell a tiny part of an enormous (and enormously complicated) story, and succeeds to a degree – although the efforts of its organisers have been hampered both by the sheer amount that has been lost to the ravages of time, and their inability to secure several of the truly outstanding examples of the art on which they have chosen to focus. The show’s title promises more than it actually delivers, because while it does contain some exceptional smaller works by Gentile Bellini (active 1460, died 1507), the greatest of his surviving pictures on an oriental theme, the magnificent canvas of St Mark Preaching in Alexandria , of 1504-7, has been deemed too precious to travel by the authorities at the Pinacoteca di Brera, in Milan, which owns it. Nothing quite compensates for its absence, although there are still things to enjoy.

The essence of Venetian art lies in its heterodox character, formed by the myriad different influences that had always flowed through a city that lived by its trade with the East. The National Gallery’s exhibition does a good job of demonstrating this, including among other things numerous examples of breathtakingly intricate Venetian metalwork, inspired by or in some cases directly imported from Islamic territories. It also suggests the way in which historical circumstances conspired to confirm leading Venetian artists and craftsmen in their habits of stylistic pluralism. Much that it contains was created in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an event which led large numbers of Orthodox Christians to flee the last crumbling remains of the once mighty Byzantine empire to seek refuge in Venice. The city became, in effect, the capital of the Greco-Byzantine diaspora, as the most famous of all such exiles, Cardinal Johannes Bessarion, remarked: “Though nations from all almost all over the earth flock in vast numbers to your city, the Greeks are most numerous of all; as they sail from their own regions they make their first landfall in Venice, and have such a tie with you that when they put into your city they feel they are entering another Byzantium.”

The grateful Bessarion gave his famous collection of manuscripts to the Republic of Venice – “for the sake of those Greeks who are left now, as well as for those who have a better fortune in the future” – and also bequeathed to the city a famous staurotheke , or container for a fragment of wood believed to come from the Real Cross. The glitteringly intricate cover of Bessarion’s reliquary, complete with a bas-relief of a writhing, sinuous crucified Christ is on display at the National Gallery. So too is Gentile Bellini’s panel painting that once served as the door of the tabernacle in which it was stored (two keyholes, long since filled in, are still visible in its surface). This work, purchased by the National Gallery just a few years ago, shows Bessarion and two members of the Venetian Scuola to which he had given the reliquary rapt in devotion before it. The Greco-Byzantine style in which the painting was created – starkly simplified poses, a flattened perspective, a strong focus on facial expression – also suggests the extent to which the so-called “Greek” manner of painting persisted in Venice long after it had gone out of fashion in the rest of Italy.

The point is reinforced by the juxtaposition of several pictures in the Byzantine style – a Madre della Consolazione painted in the first half of the sixteenth century, for example, as well as a deeply expressive fifteenth-century Raising of Lazarus , both painted by icon painters from Crete – with religious paintings by Gentile Bellini and his brother Giovanni. The differences are as striking as the similarities, but there is no doubt that each of the Bellini brothers – along with numerous other Venetian artists of their time – deliberately retained elements of Byzantine style. It might have seemed primitive to artists elsewhere, but in Venice it was so strongly associated with the aura of holiness that to abandon it altogether would have seemed inconceivable.

The exhibition reaches its climax and conclusion with a number of works by Gentile Bellini created in deference not to Byzantium but to its conqueror, Sultan Mehmet II, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. In the years following his conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet had dedicated himself to expanding his empire, seeing himself as another Alexander the Great. The Venetian Empire was deeply threatened, and diminished, by the incursions of the Ottoman navy – one of Mehmet’s fleets, fully six miles long, was described by an awestruck Venetian galley captain as making “the whole sea look like a forest”. In 1479, the Venetians sued for peace, ceding territory and trading rights, and as an additional emolument Gentile Bellini was sent to Sultan Mehmet’s court, to paint his portrait and anything else that he might wish (including, apparently, some erotic pictures, none of which have survived).

The resulting portrait of the fine-featured turbanned ruler, damaged though it is, has been one of the National Gallery’s treasures for nearly a century. But the greatest revelation of the show is a superb collection of Bellini’s quickfire, informal drawings of the Turks whom he encountered at the court of the Sultan. Drawn in a fine and rigorously spare style, the figures sometimes stare straight out from the page, as if to question the artist’s right to take their likenesses. One standing figure looks almost as though he might just be on the point of drawing a weapon concealed in his robes. (Swords were drawn fairly often at the court of Mehmet II, and the story goes that on one occasion, in order to correct the perceived inaccuracies of Bellini’s Beheading of St John the Baptist , the Sultan ordered that one of his slaves be beheaded on the spot – possibly the most incisive piece of art criticism in history.)

Other figures are more thoughtful, and most sensitively observed of all is a splendidly dressed young scribe, kneeling as he writes. Bellini did not only draw him, he coloured the image in opaque watercolour, perhaps because he was so struck by the young man’s beautiful costume of dark blue and gold, matched by the single earring in his right ear. The artist also noted his pursed lips and brilliantly caught, in his expression of utter concentration, the eagerness, innocence and peculiar vulnerability of the keen young scholar. A Muslim studies; a Venetian Christian studies him as he does so - the image is the distillation of a moment of peace, and of perfect fellow feeling.