Giovanni Bellini

I was born in Venice. I was brought up in my father's house, and always lived and worked in the closest fraternal relation with my brother Gentile. Up until the age of nearly thirty I had a depth of religious feeling and human pathos which is my own. My paintings from the early period are all executed in the old tempera method; the scene is softened by a new and beautiful effect of romantic sunrise color.

In a somewhat changed and more personal manner, with less harshness of contour and a broader treatment of forms and draperies, but not less force of religious feeling, are the Dead Christ pictures, in these days one of the master's most frequent themes. My early works have often been linked both compositionally and stylistically to those of my brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna.

          In 1470 I received my first appointment to work along with my brother and other artists in the Scuola di San Marco, where among other subjects I was commissioned to paint a Deluge with Noah's Ark. None of the master's works of this kind, whether painted for the various schools or confraternities or for the ducal palace, have survived.

          As is the case with a number of my brother, Gentile's public works of the period, many of my great public works are now lost. The still more famous altar-piece painted in tempera for a chapel in the church of S. Giovanni e Paolo, where it perished along with Titian's Peter Martyr and Tintoretto's Crucifixion in the disastrous fire of 1867.