The book that accompanies the London-Berlin exhibition Mantegna and Bellini is not by any means a catalogue, since it follows the fashion of recent years in omitting separate entries for each object exhibited, presumably because such a format is too technical or specialist to have commercial appeal. Instead, it presents high-quality illustrations of numerous works by the artists—brothers-in-law whose work transformed the history of painting in the Veneto and in Northern Italy in the later Quattrocento—along with short essays comparing the activity of the artists at various phases of their careers.

Following a series of sometimes controversial earlier exhibitions on Mantegna, one of which (Paris, Louvre, 2008) reactivated early twentieth-century quarrels about his seniority to and influence on Bellini, the 2018–19 show seems geared toward reinstating a cautious mid-twentieth-century consensus. While judiciously sidestepping the unresolvable question of Bellini's birth date, Mantegna and Bellini returns us to the position that Bellini is the junior artist, and that his first known works—none of them here dated to earlier than 1453—register the impact of Mantegna's obdurately sculptural style. An early Pietà by Bellini (Milan, Poldi Pezzoli) adapts the rocky landscape background of Mantegna's ca. 1450 Adoration of the Shepherds (New York, Metropolitan Museum) and is here dated to 1457, when Giovanni was working in Padua. Mantegna was then at work on his altarpiece for San Zeno in Verona: Bellini's close study of its spectacular predella panels is convincingly demonstrated. Drawing on the technical findings of a small exhibition in Venice in 2018, Bellini's Querini Stampalia Presentation of Christ in the Temple is presented as being based on a cartoon traced from an earlier (1453) version of the subject by Mantegna, now in Berlin.

For the premise of this exhibition to work, however, the sibling dialogue must be sustained beyond the earlier years of close contact, and correspondingly there are attempts to show that the mature Bellini in turn influenced Mantegna. The attempted even-handedness is not always supported by the works: while Bellini's Murano Resurrection of 1475–79 pointedly cites Mantegna as if to emphasize Bellini's superiority in rendering the natural world in its luminous vitality, there is little sign that the court painter of Mantua, now the most famous artist in Italy, responded to the challenge. It is a stretch to claim that Mantegna's anguished Pietà with Angels (now in Copenhagen), all grimace and rigor mortis, reflects lessons learned from Bellini's languid and sensuous dead Christs. There is moreover too much of an emphasis on seeing Mantegna's achievements in terms of the influence of Donatello's work in Padua, and not a word about the importance of the Paduan Trecento tradition. And there is only the barest consideration of function or meaning, as if the claim by a contemporary that Mantegna surpassed Bellini in invention were self-evident.

The exhibition at best was an invitation to look, requiring that the viewers explore the comparisons and juxtapositions for themselves. The purpose of this publication, however, is not fully clear. At their best (for instance the London/New York catalogue of 1992–93) individual entries can be miniature essays in acute critical observation as well as documentary and technical analysis. Mantegna and Bellini presents itself as a survey, referring to and illustrating numerous works not on display. To find out what was exhibited, the reader has to skip to a checklist at the end, which includes provenance and selective bibliographical information with conspicuous omission of work by university-based scholars. This is not, then, a publication for specialist scholars or students, nor can it be said to give a nonspecialist public access to the scholarly state of the question on Mantegna and Bellini. Since it does not highlight newly attributed works on display—a new drawing for the Triumphs of Caesar, a Resurrection of Christ now shown to be a missing upper portion of Mantegna's Descent into Limbo—there is little sense of how exhibitions can be sites of scholarship and discovery. Surely the curators deserve a better record of their work?