around 1400 - around 1470 · Venice, Padua and the first Renaissance

Between Gothic elegance and resurgent space, Iacopo Bellini transforms Venetian painting through drawing, perspective and a family workshop which prepares the work of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.

Iacopo, or Jacopo Bellini, was born in Venice around 1400. He trained with Gentile da Fabriano, master of international Gothic, whose elegant line, precious fabrics and taste for storytelling he retained. His career was documented in Venice from the 1420s, but also in Florence, Verona, Ferrara, Brescia and Padua. In Florence, contact with new research on perspective and Antiquity gradually modified his language. Bellini did not break brutally with Gothic: he superimposed the grace of figures on architecture capable of rationally organizing space. This transition appears with particular force in his two great albums of drawings, now kept at the Louvre and the British Museum. Processions, urban squares, temples, biblical scenes and architectural studies are explored in depth. The vanishing lines construct settings that are often imaginary, sometimes unstable but always ambitious, where the artist tests the narrative possibilities of perspective before transferring them to painting. A large part of his frescoes and altarpieces have disappeared, which gives the notebooks exceptional importance for understanding his invention. The Virgin of Humility adored by a prince of the House of Este combines private devotion, sponsor status and linear gentleness. The numerous Virgins and Children show how look, hand and blessing articulate emotional proximity and sacred dignity. The Adoration of the Three Wise Men allows him to display procession, costumes and architecture, while Crucifixion and Christ Crucified draw attention to sacrifice. The Bellini workshop becomes one of the major centers of Venice. His sons Gentile and Giovanni each extend part of his legacy; his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna intensified the dialogue between Venice and Padua. Iacopo died around 1470 -1471. Through his drawings and through this family transmission, he occupied a pivotal position: the last great heir of Venetian Gothic and one of the first organizers of space reborn in the lagoon. There selection "Iacopo Bellini" notably compares Crucifixion and The Adoration of the Three Kings. His reading favors movement.

Bellini's notebooks are a laboratory: architecture becomes a telling machine, and perspective further connects Gothic grace to the new world of the Renaissance.