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HOW DOES THE TINSMITH'S SON GET A JOB WITH THE MOST FAMOUS ARTIST IN ITALY?
A gap at the beginning of Jacopo Bellini's story has always bothered me. His father, Nicoletto, was a tinsmith near the Rialto, and Jacopo would ordinarily have been expected to follow him into the trade. Then, somehow, Jacopo turns up as the assistant of Gentile da Fabriano, possibly the most famous painter in Italy. How did that happen?
GENTILE DA FABRIANO: THE ARTIST BEHIND THE BELLINI WORKSHOP
When Jacopo Bellini joined Gentile da Fabriano’s workshop, he wasn’t just learning to grind pigment and paint a hand. Gentile was one of the most successful artists in Italy, and for the next decade or more Jacopo followed him from city to city: Venice, Brescia, probably Fabriano, then Florence, and perhaps beyond. Gentile worked for Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Brescia, for Palla Strozzi, one of the richest men in Florence, and in the end for the pope. Jacopo was learning to paint. He was also watching a man run an art business.
PISANELLO: THE OTHER HEIR TO GENTILE’S WORLD
Scholars disagree about where Pisanello fits. Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon, who organized the National Gallery’s Pisanello exhibition in 2001, argue that he was Gentile’s pupil and then worked beside him in Venice on the great narrative cycle in the Hall of the Great Council. Keith Christiansen, Gentile’s biographer, wasn’t convinced. He thought the dates too murky to prove that Pisanello was a pupil, and he allowed that Pisanello may have been closer to a colleague. Jacopo, on the other hand, joined Gentile as a boy and stayed for years. Nobody can show that all three ever worked in the same room.
JACOPO BELLINI ARRIVES IN FLORENCE: THE FUTURE IS ALREADY THERE
Back in 1419, when Gentile da Fabriano left Brescia with his young Venetian assistant, Jacopo Bellini, in tow, he wasn’t really headed to Florence. He was headed to the pope. Martin V, newly elected and not yet able to return to Rome, was living at Santa Maria Novella, and Gentile had promised to join him once he finished the chapel he was painting for Pandolfo Malatesta in Brescia. He made his way south by way of Fabriano, and by 1420 he had rented a house and workshop in Florence near Santa Trinita. The pope soon moved on to Rome. Gentile stayed, because Palla Strozzi made him an offer.
JACOPO BELLINI: FIGHT OR FLIGHT? HOW ABOUT BOTH
In June 1423, Jacopo Bellini was living in Gentile da Fabriano’s house in Florence, working on the most important commission of his master’s career. Then he got into a fight.
Paintings from the workshop had been set out to dry in the courtyard, and a group of boys started throwing stones at them. Jacopo went out to stop them. He singled out one, Bernardo, who was big enough that Jacopo took him for nearly grown. Words passed, Bernardo taunted him, and they came to blows. Bernardo later told the court that Jacopo had hit him on the arm with a wooden bat. It may well have been a fistfight that acquired a weapon somewhere between the courtyard and the courtroom. The real problem was Bernardo’s father, Silvestro, a Florentine notary with friends in the city’s courts.
JACOPO ON BOARD: IMAGINING LIFE ON A GALLEY IN 1423
When Jacopo Bellini fled Florence in the summer of 1423 to avoid retribution over his fight with Bernardo (see Jacopo Bellini: Fight or Flight), he didn’t just catch a boat out of town. He signed on as a hired seaman in Florence’s brand-new merchant galley system, and he stayed in it, or somewhere close to it, for well over a year.
JACOPO COMES HOME: A DEAD FATHER, A BABY BROTHER AND A WIFE WITH 250 DUCATS
When Jacopo Bellini walked out of Le Stinche on Easter Sunday 1425, it wasn’t because someone had paid his fine. Florence let a few dozen prisoners go every Easter, and the city absorbed their debts and jail costs, but only the poorest and most wretched qualified. The provision that released Jacopo says it plainly: pauperrimus est. He is very poor. That was his ticket out.
THE ROCKY BEGINNINGS OF THE BELLINI WORKSHOP
Jacopo Bellini came home to Venice with the best reference a painter could have: his apprenticeship with Gentile da Fabriano. There was just one problem. Venice was already full of Gentile. He had painted the walls of the Great Council Hall and run a workshop in town, and for twenty years Venetian painters had been helping themselves to his gold, his brocades and his sweet-faced Madonnas. The market was saturated with Gentile-like decoration. There was no room for another imitator, even a superior one.
SHELL GOLD: How Renaissance painters turned scraps of gold leaf into paint
Gold leaf is extravagant, but gilding produces scraps. The leaf is so thin that it tears, folds, and extends beyond the area being covered. When the excess was brushed away, a careful workshop did not necessarily discard it. The loose pieces and trimmings—what gilders call skewings—could be gathered and made into shell gold: real gold that could be applied with a brush. Historical recipes describe using either fresh gold leaf or the remnants left over from gilding.
DAVID HOCKNEY: A LIFE PROPERLY FRAMED
I grew up with David Hockney.
Not literally. I never knew him. But his work appeared at regular intervals throughout my life as a painter, and each time it seemed that he had gone off somewhere I hadn’t expected.
When I first became aware of him, it was through his portraits, drawings, and paintings of flowers. I was struck by the fact that he was so unapologetically representational at a moment when so much of the contemporary painting around me seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. In my mind, he sat somewhere between Matisse and Fairfield Porter. There was Matisse’s flattening of space and pleasure in color, but also something of Porter’s conviction that the world immediately around you, your friends, your rooms, the flowers on the table, was sufficient material for serious painting.
THE COUNCIL OF TEN: SECRECY, SURVEILLANCE AND PUNISHMENT IN VENICE
Venice had a complicated system of government. Power was distributed among councils, committees and elected officials, all carefully arranged to prevent any one person from taking control.
Then, in 1310, a group of Venetian noblemen tried to overthrow it.
The conspiracy failed, but it frightened the ruling class badly enough that they created a special committee to investigate what had happened and make certain it did not happen again. It was called the Council of Ten because ten patricians were elected to serve on it. The name was slightly misleading. The doge and his six councillors also attended its meetings, making seventeen men in the room before any additional members were called in.
WHO REALLY RAN VENICE?
There is something misleading about the word republic.
When we hear it, we tend to imagine citizens choosing their leaders. Venice certainly had citizens, and it was fiercely proud of not having a king. But during the years of Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, political power belonged to a relatively small group of hereditary patrician families. If you were born into one of those families, you had a place in the government. If you were not, wealth, talent and fame might bring you very close to power, but they would not give you a vote.
VENICE: AN IMPOSSIBLE CITY
At first glance, Venice is an absurd place to build a city. There is almost no firm ground. The islands are low, muddy, and divided by tidal channels. The water is salt. Stone, timber, grain, fuel, and drinking water all have to come from somewhere else. A sensible person might have moved a few miles inland.
The people who became Venetians did the opposite.
By the time of the Bellinis, this unlikely settlement had become one of Europe's wealthiest and most powerful cities. It had spread across scores of small islands and commanded an extensive maritime empire. Venice prospered not despite the lagoon, but because of it. The same water that made the city difficult to build also made it difficult to attack. It connected Venice to the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean while keeping it just beyond the easy reach of mainland rulers.
CARL RUGGLES - ARTIST, COMPOSER AND NEIGHBOR
Carl Ruggles lived and worked in a weather-worn one-room schoolhouse in Arlington, Vermont, where he spent every morning chiseling dissonant counterpoint and every afternoon pouring color onto paper. This post visits his twin legacies: the explosive watercolors “Trumpet Flower” (1940) and “The Pool, Roaring Branch” (1932) that pulse like Vermont’s Batten Kill, and the sixteen granite-hard musical scores—Sun-Treader, Men and Mountains, and more—that made him a cult hero of American modernism. Along the way we hear composer Henry Brant’s first-hand tale of finding Ruggles hammering a single piano key “to make sure it’s a good note,” and we trace how the local Roaring Branch stream fed both his pigments and his brass chords. Whether you’re hiking School Street for a glimpse of Ruggles’s old studio or spinning Sun-Treader to rattle your speakers, you’ll discover why this Arlington neighbor still matters to painters, musicians, and anyone who prizes art made the slow, stubborn way—one bold color, one uncompromising note at a time.
LE JAPON ARTISTIQUE: THE MAGAZINE THAT CARRIED JAPAN INTO THE HEART OF EUROPE
When Siegfried Bing launched Le Japon Artistique in 1888, he wasn’t merely publishing a magazine — he was setting fire to the imaginations of Europe's artists, designers, and dreamers. Over its three transformative years in print, this elegant publication didn’t just spread images of Japanese art across Europe; it rewired the very way artists thought about space, form, and nature. Through its pages, Japonism didn’t remain a trend — it became a revolution.
SIEGFRIED BING AND THE RISE OF JAPONISM IN FRANCE: The Man Who Brought Japan to Paris
Siegfried Bing and the Rise of Japonism in France: The Man Who Brought Japan to Paris
When we think of the Impressionists — Monet, Degas, Van Gogh — we often picture solitary geniuses revolutionizing the art world with bold colors and radical brushstrokes. But behind their innovations stood a key figure: Siegfried Bing, the art dealer whose passion for Japanese art transformed 19th-century Paris and sparked the Japonisme movement that reshaped Western aesthetics.
BLACKER THAN BLACK: ANISH KAPOOR AND THE DISAPPEARING OBJECT
Some time ago I wrote a very short blog post called Having Sex with Artists. I had dreamed that I had sex with Frank Stella under a boardwalk on Fire Island. Not long after that, Anish Kapoor turned up in another dream, this time courting me.
Harold Bloom called it the anxiety of influence. I called it having sex with artists.
Apparently Kapoor had already made his way into my subconscious.
Now that I have been looking at black paintings, I have a more respectable reason to think about him.
PIERRE SOULAGES: LIGHT REVEALED BY BLACK
Pierre Soulages is the artist I think of first when I think of black paintings.
I have seen his work in several settings over the years, and I remember being overwhelmed at first by the blackness. It dampened my spirit. I don’t know quite how else to put it. There was simply too much black.
And then, almost despite myself, I began to see the light.
It caught the edge of a ridge of paint. Then another. A streak appeared where a tool had dragged through the surface. As I moved, the light moved with me. I could suddenly see that Soulages was drawing with light.
The black wasn’t there to create a void. It was there to give the light something to catch on.