СИЗОНЕНКО ТАТЬЯНА (Исследовательский институт Гетти, США). Новый взгляд на исторические картины Джентиле Беллини
TATIANA SIZONENKO (Getty Research Institute, USA). Inscribing Venice through Celestial Visions: New Perspectives on Gentile Bellini’s Istoria Paintings
Patricia Fortini Brown’s groundbreaking work on Venetian istoria paintings situated them in the tradition of Venetian chronicles in the transitional period from chronicles to humanist histories. This paper further explores how artists like Gentile Bellini, for example, created not only a means of historical verification but also a form of Venetian image-making that complemented contemporaneous humanist discourse on Venice’s cultural identity and origins. Few quattrocento paintings make stronger claims to historical fidelity than large-scale scuola painting Procession in the Piazza San Marco (1496) for the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice. Yet, the painting’s supposed accuracy in rendering the historical event is largely a pictorial effect for its subject is intentionally fabricated. The painting forcefully collapses past and present that no text could match. Guided by Alberti’s principles of visually composed istoria, Bellini constructs a uniquely Venetian humanist painting that is not necessarily about a particular event of the past that was significant to the members of the scuola, but instead magisterially figures a portrait of Venice, celebrating the city and its humanist ideals of virtù associated with a certain class of patrons. Reconsidering Bellini’s Procession in the Piazza San Marco (1496), this paper argues that his representational style dramatizes a complex interaction between historical construction and enunciation of political and religious authority. Joining sacred events to the political history of the city, and then developing a visually-driven narrative on large-scale canvases decorating the albergo of San Giovanni Evangelista, Bellini presented what one might call an “Image-Paradigm” of Venice as a Heavenly City, a successor to Greco-Roman and Byzantine civilization in the Mediterranean world.
Gentile Bellini, Renaissance Venice, visual istoria, humanism
Джентиле Беллини, Венеция эпохи Возрождения, визуальная история, гуманизм