Jacopo Bellini

Jacopo Bellini stood at the head of the family that made Venice a great painting city. Trained in the International Gothic style of gold and elegant line, he lived long enough to absorb the new Renaissance interest in perspective and antiquity, and he passed all of it to the next generation.

That generation was largely his own household. His sons Gentile and Giovanni Bellini became the leading painters of Venice, Giovanni above all the teacher of Giorgione and Titian, and his daughter married Andrea Mantegna, the brilliant painter of nearby Padua, tying two schools together by marriage.

Little of Jacopo's own painting survives, but two of his sketchbooks do, and they are treasures. Page after page of drawings, saints and horsemen and ruins set in deep, carefully ruled perspective spaces, show a mind working out the new art in private. He left them to Gentile, and through them shaped Venetian painting long after his death around 1470.