Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1516 (b ?1431-6; d Venice, 29 Nov 1516). Painter and draughtsman, son of (1) Jacopo Bellini. Although the professional needs of his family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting, by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practised in 15th-century Venice. Later, towards the end of his long life, he added the new genres of mythological painting and secular allegory to his repertory of subject-matter. His increasing dominance of Venetian art led to an enormous expansion of his workshop after c. 1490; and this provided the training-ground not only for his numerous shop-hands and imitators (generically known as Belliniani) but probably also for a number of major Venetian painters of the next generation. Throughout his career, Giovanni showed an extraordinary capacity for absorbing a wide range of artistic influences, both from within Venetian tradition and from outside. He also oversaw a technical revolution in the art of painting, involving the gradual abandonment of the traditional Italian use of egg tempera in favour of the technique of oil painting pioneered in the Netherlands. It was thanks to Giovanni Bellini that the Venetian school of painting was transformed during the later 15th century from one mainly of local significance to one with an international reputation. He thus set the stage for the triumphs of Venetian painting in the 16th century and for the central contribution that Venice was to make to the history of European art.  Related Paintings of Giovanni Bellini :. | St Jerome Reading in the Countryside | Transfiguration et | Pesaro Altarpiece | Sts Christopher | Falsehood |
Related Artists:
Henry Singleton
British Painter, 1766-1839,English painter and illustrator. His father died when he was young, and he was brought up by his uncle, the miniature painter William Singleton (d 1793). In 1782 he entered the Royal Academy Schools in London and in 1784 won a silver medal for a drawing from life, exhibiting at the Royal Academy for the first time the same year. He showed considerable promise and in 1788 won a gold medal for a painting inspired by John Dryden's ode Alexander's Feast that was especially praised by Reynolds. In 1793 Singleton was commissioned by the Royal Academy to paint the group portrait the Royal Academicians Assembled in their Council Chamber (London, RA). He soon became noted for his paintings inspired by the Bible and from literary sources, among them Manto and Tiresias (exh. 1792; London, Tate) from John Dryden's Oedipus, and for his depictions of contemporary historical events, of which the watercolour Design Commemorative of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807; London, BM) is an example. Many of his works were engraved in mezzotint and achieved a widespread popularity. He also painted portraits, the writer James Boswell (c. 1795; Edinburgh, N.P.G.) being one of his sitters. Many of Singleton's later works are inclined to be sentimental and were carelessly executed; they were often intended solely for engraving.
ASPERTINI, Amico
Italian Painter, ca.1474-1552 He was born in Bologna to a family of painters (Guido Aspertini and Giovanni Antonio Aspertini, his father), and studied under masters such as Lorenzo Costa and Francesco Francia. He is briefly documented in Rome between 1500-1503, returning to Bologna and painting in a style influenced by Pinturicchio. In Bologna in 1504, he joined Francia and Costa in painting frescoes for the newly restored Oratory of Santa Cecilia in San Giacomo Maggiore, a work commissioned by Giovanni II Bentivoglio. In 1507-09, he painted a fresco cycle in San Frediano in Lucca. Asperini painted in 1508-1509 the splendid frescoes in the Chapel of the Cross in the Basilica di San Frediano in Lucca. Aspertini was also one of two artists chosen to decorate a triumphal arch for the entry into Bologna of Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V in 1529. He died in Bologna. Giorgio Vasari describes Aspertini as having an eccentric personality, who, half-insane, worked so rapidly with both hands that chiaroscuro was split, chiaro in one hand, scuro in the other. He quotes Aspertini as complaining that all other Bolognese colleagues were copying Raphael. Aspertini also painted façade decorations (all lost), and altarpieces, many of which are often eccentric and charged in expression. For example, his Bolognese Pieta appears to occur in an other-worldy electric sky.
Jorg Breu the Elder
(c. 1475 -- 1537), of Augsburg, was a painter of the German Danube school. He was the son of a weaver. He journeyed to Austria and created several multi-panel altarpieces there in 1500-02, such as the Melk Altar (1502). He returned to Augsburg in 1502 where he became a master. He travelled to Italy twice, in ca. 1508 and in 1514/15. After his death in 1537, his son, Jörg Breu the Younger continued to lead his Augsburg workshop until his own death 10 years later.