This collection of essays, introduced and edited by the seasoned Bellini scholar Carolyn C. Wilson, is the permanent record of six sessions devoted to the artist at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Venice in 2010. It captures the quality and breadth of recent scholarship on the artist, and the range of scholars now thinking about his work and immediate context. The essays are extremely varied, but, as Wilson notes, clustered around certain themes. These include the close reading and interpretation of specific details in the paintings (flowers and plants, garments, landscape, antique sources), portraiture by and around Bellini, the Frick Saint Francis, the market for his devotional work, and his influence on younger artists. The volume ends with Peter Humfrey’s interesting exploration of Bellini’s reputation and collecting history in Britain until 1900, reminding us of the turn in taste that resulted in the important writings on the artist by Ruskin, Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and Roger Fry, as well as the arrival of great paintings in British and then American collections. Wilson’s choice of subtitle (“an art ‘more human and more divine’”), a quotation from a sonnet by Andrea Michiel, known as Squarzòla or Strazzola, was chosen to draw attention to Bellini’s fashioning of “a pictorial world that so closely portrays mankind’s and at once so strongly bespeaks the creation of God” (9). The essays also go back and forth between these two poles.

It is a testament to the vibrancy of Bellini studies that other recent publications have addressed many of the themes found here as well. In some cases, when read together these provide an extraordinary sense of knowledge expanding, as with the archival research on the provenance of the Saint Francis carried out by Rosella Lauber when combined with Anne-Marie Eze’s essay in the Frick’s publication In a New Light: Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert (2015). Lauber has added information about the painting’s original owner, Zuan Giacomo Michiel, and then constructs—link by link—the movements of the painting from Taddeo Contarini (by 1525) through 1817 (although her tale is not always perfectly easy to follow). Eze covers some of the same ground, but then provides new information about the painting’s movements from the first decades of the nineteenth century. Where Zuan Michiel initially kept the painting remains a topic of discussion.

At the same time—and still attesting to this scholarly activity—the rather long lapse of time between the conference in 2010 and the appearance of the book has led to some missed opportunities. An asterisk in the bibliography designates texts that appeared too late to incorporate into our author’s findings. It is unfortunate that the arguments of some—one example of which is Daniel Maze’s complex and debated article on Giovanni’s birth and family relations (“Giovanni Bellini: Birth, Parentage, and Independence,” Renaissance Quarterly 66.3 [2013])—could not be addressed. In addition, some important studies from the years immediately following the conference did not make their way into either the essays or the bibliography. For a number of the works of art under discussion this is a significant drawback.

Some of the most satisfying essays contribute to our ever-increasing understanding of the artist’s sensitivity to objects—man-made and natural—around him, and his ability to draw meaning from them. Beverly Brown shows the care with which he introduced a sequence of motifs drawn from ancient “micro-sculpture” (coins and gems) into the frieze of the throne in the Coronation of the Virgin, battles leading to a triumphal progression, probably with Christian purpose. Blass-Simmens analyzes Bellini’s aim to depict distances—lontani in contemporary sources—in a manner that convinces, yet suggests transcendence, with particular regard to the Berlin Resurrection of Christ. And Mauro Di Vito contributes to the understanding of the Frick Saint Francis by returning to the identification of plants, animals, and weather, including a detailed discussion of the Verbascum Thapsus, or mullein, that flowers behind the saint’s arm, helping us to clarify the time of day and season. Likewise, the innovative quality of Bellini’s portraits and those of his contemporaries has been much to the fore in recent publications, and the contributions in this volume provide interesting readings. The year 2016 was the 500th anniversary of Bellini’s death, and its commemoration in a volume of such absorbing and varied writing is very gratifying.