{"product_id":"giovanni-bellini-the-last-works","title":"Giovanni Bellini: The Last Works","description":"Giovanni Bellini (d. 1516) worked to the end of a long career that left an indelible mark on Venetian painting. His longevity and indefatigable devotion to his art created  a problem for art historians, however, for he is one of those Quattrocento masters who remained active into the period we call the High Renaissance. But while his colleagues became irrelevant, Bellini, in the first decades of the Sixteenth century, continued  to be creatively vital. Indeed, he flourished as never before.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Vasari and other early writers failed to distinguish Bellini's late works from the rest  of his production. Focused on Titian as the quintessential \"old age\" artist, subsequent  writers have also paid little attention to Bellini's late work as a separate phase of his  career. Such studies as there are treat everything he painted after the turn of the century as a whole and in approximation to Giorgione, said by Vasari to have invented  the \"maniera moderna\" in Venice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e To be properly understood, Bellini's pictures from the last decade and a half of his life must be divided into two separate categories. The six paintings he made during his final years (1513-16) constitute a distinct group that differs significantly from his previous works in style, support, subject matter, and mood. Bellini did not choose the subjects of his last pictures, which were stipulated by his patrons, but in a period in  which he relied more and more on assistants, his decision to undertake and personally  conceive and execute them points to a special commitment on his part to their creation.  The Feast of the Gods  (National Gallery of Art, Washington), dated 1514, and other  works that follow it, like the  Woman with a Mirror  in Vienna and the  Drunkenness of  Noah  in Bensançon, display a much expanded range of subject matter and a new degree  of inventiveness. They reveal a great artist driven to excel still further, to explore new territory, and, in a burst of creativity, to make his final achievement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e New technical investigations have played a key role in grasping the novelty of Bellini's last works. The artist's great mythological canvas in Washington, in particular, has been the subject of a recent scientific investigation using the latest multi-spectral scanning technology. This study, undertaken by the scientific lab at the National  Gallery of Art, marks a major advance in the technical analysis of works of art. And it literally sheds new light on the  Feast of the Gods , allowing us to see more clearly  than ever before images or motifs hidden below the paint surface. These details buried in the paint layers represent the artist's first ideas so the technical investigation  makes a major contribution to understanding his creativity.","brand":"Skira Editore S.p.A","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42665613492260,"sku":"9788857239965","price":145.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0725\/9734\/0196\/files\/9788857239965.jpg?v=1773267633","url":"https:\/\/thamesandhudson.com.au\/products\/giovanni-bellini-the-last-works","provider":"Thames \u0026 Hudson Australia","version":"1.0","type":"link"}