1. Introduction
“We learned this morning of the death of Giovanni Bellini, the great painter,” wrote the Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo (1466–1536) on 29 November 1516, “who died at the age of …”Footnote 1 Sanudo left a blank space that historians for five centuries have attempted to fill. Other questions have been raised about the early life of the Venetian artist, generally believed to have been the son of Jacopo Bellini (ca. 1400–70/71) and the younger brother of Gentile Bellini (1429/35–1507).Footnote 2 Some scholars have sought to explain why Jacopo’s wife, Anna, did not mention him in her will of 25 November 1471, since under Venetian law this omission means that Giovanni could not have been Anna and Jacopo’s legitimate son.Footnote 3 Others have wondered how the young Giovanni could afford to establish his own household in 1459, in the parish of San Lio, while his presumed brother Gentile stayed in his father Jacopo’s house, in the parish of San Geminiano.Footnote 4 The most consequential problem, one that Peter Humfrey has called “crucial for a proper understanding of his early career,” remains Giovanni’s date of birth, which some have argued was as early as ca. 1425 and others as late as 1440, with ca. 1435 or later being favored by most contemporary Bellini specialists.Footnote 5
The following article answers these questions by reevaluating Bellini-related legal documents in light of the relevant fifteenth-century Venetian civil laws.Footnote 6 It can also serve as a case study demonstrating several ways that valuable biographical information might be extracted from primary source legal documents when they are interpreted according to the applicable civil statutes under which they were written. Hence this study may encourage worthwhile reanalysis of legal documents connected not only to Quattrocento Venetian artists, but also to any number of historical figures who lived in medieval or early modern Europe.
When the Bellini legal documents are evaluated under the relevant civil laws, a strong case can be made that Giovanni Bellini was not Jacopo Bellini’s son, but rather his half-brother, both of them sons of Nicolò Bellini; that Giovanni was therefore Gentile Bellini’s uncle rather than his brother; and that he was born legitimate between the late summer of 1424 and 13 September 1428. This range of dates for Giovanni’s birth is much earlier than several recent estimates, but has two important precedents. First, it accords with the birth year indicated by Giorgio Vasari, who wrote that Giovanni died at age ninety (on 20 November 1516).Footnote 7 Secondly, it concurs with a long-established theory, championed by a number of scholars, including Giuseppe Fiocco (1884–1971) and Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), that Giovanni was born in the mid- to late 1420s, a position supported by little documentary evidence until now.Footnote 8
Giovanni Bellini’s earlier birth date is strongly implied by a number of features of Venetian law that will be examined individually, including the fraternal partnership and its division, the legitimacy of sons, the minimum legal age for autonomously entering into contracts, rights of inheritance, and adoption or legal guardianship.
2. Division of a Fraternal Partnership
On 13 September 1440 the Venetian notary Vittore Pomino recorded in his register (protocollo) an act separating the property of two brothers, Giovanni and Jacopo Bellini, both sons of the deceased Nicolò Bellini and both residing in the Venetian parish of San Geminiano (fig. 1).Footnote 9 First published in 1929, this document has been interpreted to mean that the fifteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini had an illegitimate half-brother, the so-called Giovanni Bellini il Vecchio, with whom he once shared an artist’s workshop.Footnote 10 A contextualized analysis of Pomino’s 1440 notarial act, however, reveals that it almost certainly did not refer to a conjectured Giovanni Bellini il Vecchio — who in all probability never in fact existed — but rather to the boy Giovanni Bellini, later to become the famous painter, who was therefore Jacopo Bellini’s half-brother.
Figure 1. Charter of division between the brothers Giovanni and Jacopo Bellini, sons of the deceased Nicolò, 13 September 1440. Venice, State Archives, Cancelleria Inferiore, Notai, b. 149, Protocollum mei Victoris Pomino, c. 55v. Photo rights: Archivio di Stato di Venezia su concessione del Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Culturali, atti nn. 49–50/2012, prott. 5247–48/28.13.07.
Pomino’s act of 1440 was a common notarial instrument, executed on behalf of legitimately born brothers, known as a division or charter of division (divisio or carta divisionis) as its first line states: “The division to occur between the brothers is declared lawful, et cetera.”Footnote 11 Venetian civil law, which was codified in five books of statutes in 1242 during the dogate of Jacopo Tiepolo, decreed that when a father died, his legitimate, unemancipated sons were automatically thrust into a fraternal partnership (fraterna compagnia) through which they would jointly own all the property inherited from their father: “Chapter concerning the fraternal partnership. 4. We decree that, once the father is dead, the brothers remain in a fraternal partnership … unless they themselves make a division. However, if a father or any ancestor has bequeathed to a son or any descendent some specific thing, it will not be included in the fraternal partnership.”Footnote 12 In Venice, fraternal partnerships were the most prevalent form of business association among craftsmen and merchants: their members regularly remained in the family business, carrying on their partnership, until death.Footnote 13 If the sons were not, however, in the same business, or if they did not wish to be bound legally to one another, or if they desired to enter into another type of business association, then Tiepolo’s statutes described how it might be terminated:
On dividing estates between brothers. 5. We decree that, although it has hitherto been customary in Venice that the older brother divided the father’s estate and that the younger brother or brothers received shares assigned by the older brother, henceforth we decree that, when dividing their father’s estate, all brothers are equal.
For those who have an undivided estate and one of them desires to divide it and know his share. 6. We decree that, if several persons together own an undivided estate, and they are all present in Venice, and any one of them who has been in Venice desires to divide this estate and know his share, then he should call the other or others who also have a share in this estate and announce to the other or others that he wishes to divide the estate; and by this act they should divide this estate among themselves: but if they refuse or have been unable to agree among themselves, the judges must divide this estate and cast lots.Footnote 14
In other words, all brothers in a fraternal partnership, upon its dissolution, received an equal share of their father’s estate, unless the father’s will had assigned it otherwise. Any of the brothers could initiate a separation, and in amicable separations only a notary was required. The notary would employ a very common legal instrument, a division (divisio), to dissolve the fraternal partnership, and thus assign to each legitimate son an equal share of his father’s estate and grant to each legal independence from his brothers.Footnote 15
As its first line declared and as its standard form indicates, Pomino’s notarial act of 13 September 1440 terminating Giovanni and Jacopo Bellini’s fraternal partnership was such a charter of division. Eleven days later, on 24 September 1440, Jacopo Bellini engaged a different notary to draw up a contractual agreement between himself and the painter Donato Bragadin, with whom he intended to enter into a five-year business partnership.Footnote 16 The partnership itself might never have become a reality; the contract was not witnessed and was crossed out without a date in the register of the notary.Footnote 17 Nevertheless, it provides a plausible reason for the existence of the divisio of eleven days earlier: Jacopo needed to end the fraternal partnership with his brother, Giovanni, before entering into a business partnership with another party.Footnote 18
3. Legitimacy, Minimum Age for Entering into Contracts, and Rights of Inheritance
The existence of the 1440 divisio between Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini informs us that both were legitimate sons of Nicolò. The Venetian civil statutes of 1242 followed the prevalent classical Roman and medieval legal concept of paternal power (patria potestas), which granted the father or grandfather as patriarch of the family (paterfamilias) rights over all his legitimate male descendants along the male line, including his sons, grandsons, and great grandsons.Footnote 19 A gloss to the Venetian civil statute concerning intestate inheritance explained: “You should call those legitimate who are born of legitimate marriage and free parents, but there is no provision in Venetian statute regarding other sons.”Footnote 20 When the Venetian law employed the term filius without further qualification, as in the above statutes describing fraternal partnerships, a legitimate son was intended.
Neither Giovanni nor his half-brother Jacopo could have been born illegitimate, because illegitimates were legally not sons of the family (filiifamilias) and could not enter into fraternal partnerships.Footnote 21 Illegitimate sons had no such rights of inheritance, as the following gloss to the Venetian statutes, describing various types of illegitimate sons, makes clear: “Mançer, properly speaking, is the name given to one born from a whore, that is, a public prostitute; spurius is one born from a concubine who is not retained in the home like a wife, or one born from a blood relative or a nun. Nothus is one born from adultery; just as we call a fever nothus, which afflicts like a quartan fever but is not a true quartan, so do we call a person nothus, who seems to be a son but is not. All such illegitimates are denied positions of honor and have no rights of succession; by no means should their parents even support them.”Footnote 22 Jacopo and Giovanni succeeded as co-members of the fraternal partnership that collectively owned the inherited estate of their deceased father, Nicolò, only as legitimate male offspring legally had the right to do.Footnote 23
To agree independently to a charter of division, Giovanni Bellini, the son of Nicolò, was required to be over the age of twelveFootnote 24 : “Since nobody is considered able to act in contracts or judgments unless he or she is of legal age, we decree that it is suitable to define something about the age of mind. Therefore, we state that any person, either male or female, after he or she has turned twelve, should be considered of proper age.”Footnote 25 Any contract entered into by Giovanni, if he was under twelve and his father deceased, required the undersignatures of two magistrates (iudices examinatorum) from the Court of the Examiner (curia del esaminador) in order for it to be valid.Footnote 26 Since magistrates did not sign the division of 13 September 1440 between Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini, Giovanni must have already reached the age of twelve.Footnote 27 Thus Giovanni Bellini, Jacopo’s half-brother, must have been born before 13 September 1428, twelve years prior to 13 September 1440, the date of the division.
On 11 April 1424 Nicolò Bellini had a notary draw up a will on his behalf that designated Nicolò’s legitimate son Jacopo as an heir, but did not name Giovanni.Footnote 28 In his will Nicolò bequeathed portions of his estate to his second wife, Franceschina; to his two children by his previous, deceased wife, Giovannina, namely, his son, the painter Jacopo Bellini, and his daughter, Elena; to Elena’s daughter, Caterina; and, if Caterina died and Elena had no other daughters, to Alixeta, the daughter of Nicolò’s own adopted daughter, Menega.Footnote 29
If Nicolò had had a living, legitimate son named Giovanni when his will was drawn up, Giovanni’s omission would have been not only surprising, but also unlawful.Footnote 30 In Renaissance Venice fathers were required to identify their legitimate sons in their wills, even if their intent was to disinherit them. Otherwise, the will could be overturned.Footnote 31 As an officer of the court, a fifteenth-century Venetian notary would not have allowed a will to have been drawn up that omitted a legitimate son.Footnote 32 Therefore, Nicolò’s legitimate son Giovanni Bellini must not yet have been born when Nicolò composed his will of 1424.
Thus Giovanni Bellini, son of Nicolò, was born at least several months after 11 April 1424, the date of Nicolò’s will (in which Franceschina was understood as not being pregnant), and sometime before 13 September 1428, twelve years prior to the date of the division of 1440.Footnote 33 That Giovanni was an adolescent between the ages of twelve and sixteen when he entered into the 1440 divisio is confirmed by the document itself: it was written entirely in standardized, unspecific language as if a formality. It neither describes the profession of the two Bellini brothers, nor stipulates which would receive ownership of the workshop, or other property, nor does it enumerate any particulars whatsoever, such as whether the wives’ dowries had been included in, or excluded from, the partnership. Such details were invariably itemized in divisions between adult brothers, such as that between Luca and Vito Bono, drawn up by the same notary Vittore Pomino a few months before the division of Giovanni and Jacopo.Footnote 34 In the Bono brothers’ divisio, Luca and Vito were described as furriers (varotarii), who had employed their wives’ dowries in their business, and who agreed to separate so that Luca would retain the shop on the street of furriers near the Rialto, while Vito would receive thirty-nine ducats in exchange.Footnote 35 Unlike the divisio between Giovanni and Jacopo, that between Luca and Vito Bono methodically separated real property that had been shared between adults.Footnote 36
4. Legal Guardianship and Adoption
The will of 11 April 1424 is the last-known record of Giovanni Bellini’s father, Nicolò, as living. He was dead by the summer of 1429, for on 23 July of that year Jacopo Bellini engaged a notary to draw up a standard legal instrument (carta securitatis et manifestacionis repromisse) in which he acknowledged receiving his wife Anna’s dowry of 250 ducats and was described as “Jacopo Bellini, a painter residing in the parish of San Geminiano and son of the deceased ser Nicoletto Bellini (fig. 2).”Footnote 37 Thus Giovanni was no older than four, and he might have not yet been born, when his and Jacopo’s father, Nicolò, died.
Figure 2. Jacopo Bellini acknowledges receipt of his wife Anna’s dowry, 23 July 1429. Venice, State Archives, Cancelleria Inferiore, Notai, b. 212, fasc. notaio T. de Tomei. Documento 1429, luglio 23. Photo rights: Archivio di Stato di Venezia su concessione del Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Culturali, atti nn. 49–50/2012, prott. 5247–48/28.13.07. The abbreviated “quondam” signifies that Nicolò was deceased.
In Renaissance Venice, legal guardians were appointed to those under twelve years old whose fathers were deceased.Footnote 38 Guardians had fiduciary powers to negotiate for the minor and were entitled to one-fourth of monies gained, the remainder belonging to the minor.Footnote 39 A Venetian civil court called the curia di petizion would have assigned a guardian.Footnote 40 Given the legal role of the father in Venetian law, Giovanni Bellini would have needed a legal guardian even if his mother had survived.Footnote 41
Nothing is known about Franceschina apart from her husband’s will of 1424. It is probable, however, that Franceschina had either died during or soon after Giovanni’s birth — in any event before 1440 — or else had surrendered Giovanni to be raised by the patriarchal side of his family, a not-uncommon occurrence in Renaissance Venice.Footnote 42 First, no known documents apart from Nicolò’s will name Franceschina, and death may explain her absence from recorded history. Secondly, in the 1440 Bellini divisio, both Giovanni and Jacopo were described as residing in San Geminiano, presumably in the same household, and not in the parish of San Salvatore, where Nicolò and Franceschina’s home had been, according to Nicolò’s will of 1424.Footnote 43 (Jacopo had lived in San Geminiano since at least 6 February 1429, the date his wife, Anna, drew up her first will, and continued to live in the parish for the rest of his life.)Footnote 44 Finally, if the Giovanni Bellini named in the 1440 Bellini divisio is indeed the famous painter, then the fact that the later recorded relationship between Jacopo and Giovanni was nearly indistinguishable from that between a father and son further suggests that Franceschina had died or departed soon after Giovanni’s birth.
It is therefore likely that Jacopo acted as his half-brother’s legal guardian (tutor).Footnote 45 It is possible that Jacopo adopted his young half-brother. Legal adoption in Renaissance Venice is neither well studied nor well understood.Footnote 46 Adoption of a male might occur in instances where the patriarch (paterfamilias) was aging and had no legitimate son for an heir, such as when the painter Jacobello del Fiore adopted Ercole (who was one of the witnesses to the 1440 Bellini divisio).Footnote 47 In some cases the adopted child might have been treated like a servant, as when a woman named Lucia, in an early Quattrocento legal document, was described as the “servant or adopted daughter” of her adoptive father Bartolomeo.Footnote 48 In some adoptive relationships, such as that of Lucia or the artist Mantegna when adopted by Squarcione, the adopted individual was expected to provide labor, but, according to Venetian law, an adopted son remained outside the paternal authority of the adoptive father, and therefore could depart from the adoptive family in accordance with the terms of any legal contract that he might have signed pertaining to the adoption.Footnote 49 In still other cases the adopted child could be treated like a biological one.Footnote 50 Whether Jacopo was Giovanni’s adoptive father or simply his legal guardian, Giovanni was certainly raised as if he were Jacopo’s child.
5. Emancipation
In 1459 Giovanni resided in the Venetian parish of San Lio rather than in Jacopo’s household in San Geminiano, implying that he had previously been emancipated.Footnote 51 In fifteenth-century Venice and elsewhere, the legal concept of emancipation broadly defined an individual’s entitlements and his relationship to the family workshop, and thus requires some explanation.Footnote 52 Emancipation derived from the classical Roman principle of sovereign paternal power (patria potestas), which, as mentioned earlier, granted the patriarch of the family rights over all his legitimate male descendants along the male line. Legitimately born children were legal dependents of their fathers until the children were emancipated, which did not occur when they reached a given age or were married, but rather only through a legal act of emancipation or by the death of the father (or in rare cases by adoption).Footnote 53
In theory a father had the right to his unemancipated son’s movable property, to the usufruct from his son’s inherited immovable property, and to the income from his son’s labor.Footnote 54 To make a binding contract in Renaissance Venice, an unemancipated son needed either power of attorney from his father or the permission and signatures of two magistrates from the Court of the Examiner.Footnote 55 When writing a contract, Venetian notaries were careful to record whether the person’s father was dead (quondam), whether the person was emancipated (emancipatus a patre meo), or whether he had his father’s permission (de licentia dicti patris mei).Footnote 56
A legal act of emancipation, or the death of the father, liberated the son, making him a homo sui iuris, possessed with full legal rights, and a paterfamilias (patriarch of his own family) under the law.Footnote 57 In Venice, the contractual act of emancipation required a legal instrument called a charter of emancipation (carta emancipationis), consented to by the father, signed by witnesses, recorded by a notary or magistrate, and subsequently registered in the Cancelleria inferiore as a public record because it involved the ownership of property.Footnote 58 Fathers had little incentive, however, to emancipate sons who labored in the family workshop: the father as patriarch signed the contracts, the sons were bound to the father, and the sons’ labor did not require payment. Instead, the legitimate sons would eventually inherit the workshop and other property that the father owned, as was their legal right.Footnote 59
Some historians have wondered how Giovanni Bellini was able to depart from Jacopo’s household by 1459.Footnote 60 If Giovanni was indeed Nicolò’s legitimate son, however, then he legally had the right to do so, that is, to establish his own household and become patriarch of his own family, because he would have been emancipated when his father, Nicolò, died. (It is doubtful whether a charter of emancipation ever existed for either Giovanni or Gentile, and none has been found.)Footnote 61 In contrast, Jacopo’s biological son Gentile continued to reside with his father, in all likelihood under paternal authority (in patris potestate) until Jacopo’s death in 1470/71, at which point Gentile became emancipated. Gentile then continued to live in San Geminiano, apparently in his father’s home workshop, for the duration of his life.Footnote 62
Establishing a household was a major expense in Renaissance Venice, and was typically funded by a wife’s dowry.Footnote 63 Yet according to extant documents, it is uncertain whether Giovanni Bellini was married prior to relocating to San Lio.Footnote 64 As Nicolò’s legitimate son, however, he would have inherited half of his father’s estate, which was rather large, as indicated by Nicolò’s will of 1424 — and more sizeable still had the estate been successfully invested in the years since Nicolò’s death.Footnote 65 Giovanni might also have succeeded to his mother’s dowry, had she died young.Footnote 66 Thus his inheritance alone, whether or not he received a wife’s dowry, likely provided Giovanni with more than sufficient funds to establish a residence.
Several historians have questioned why, in her will of 1471, Jacopo Bellini’s wife, Anna Rinversi bequeathed her estate to her sons Gentile and Nicolò without naming Giovanni. Since the discourse until now has assumed that Giovanni was the son of Jacopo, some have understood his absence from Anna’s will as demonstrating that he was not her son and thus illegitimate; others have argued that the omission alone does not prove illegitimacy.Footnote 67 Instead, Giovanni as Nicolò’s son would have been Anna Rinversi’s brother-in-law, and not her son. Thus, she was not legally required to bequeath a legacy to Giovanni and, in her will, in fact named none of her affinal relatives, neither her sister-in-law, Elena, nor her nephew-by-marriage Leonardo (ca. 1424–ca. 1490), whom she and Jacopo had helped raise from when he was about six or eight years old.Footnote 68
6. Giovanni Bellini il Vecchio
Since its publication in 1929, the Bellini notarial document of 13 September 1440 has generally been interpreted as a legal act dissolving a business co-owned by two adult brothers, Jacopo and Giovanni, sons of Nicolò Bellini, rather than as a divisio separating a fraterna compagnia as it is interpreted here.Footnote 69 This brother, the so-called Giovanni Bellini il Vecchio, would have been Jacopo’s business associate, as well as half-brother, and born illegitimate because the 1424 will of their father, Nicolò, does not mention a son named Giovanni.Footnote 70 As has been demonstrated here, however, the Giovanni Bellini named in the divisio must have been born legitimate between 1424 and 1428, and in 1440 was almost certainly living in Jacopo Bellini’s household. This Giovanni was not illegitimate, nor at that time could he have been a mature artist. The painter Giovanni Bellini il Vecchio, conjectured by some historians to account for the divisio of 1440, is a fiction.
It is still possible that there were two Giovanni Bellinis, and that the son of Nicolò named in the divisio is not the same as the famous painter, who was otherwise first documented in 1459.Footnote 71 But if they were not the same, then there were two boys named Giovanni Bellini, both under the age of sixteen in 1440, both living in the Venetian parish of San Geminiano, both lineal descendants of Nicolò Bellini and both closely connected to, and likely residing in, Jacopo Bellini’s household, one becoming a renowned painter, and the other, Jacopo’s half-brother, leaving not a single conclusive trace of his existence except for the divisio of 1440. It is far more likely that these two were one and the same.
7. Relative Ages of Giovanni and Gentile
If the hypothesis presented here is correct, then Giovanni was older than Gentile, who was born no earlier than 1429. In his 1550 edition of the Vite, Giorgio Vasari describes Gentile Bellini as younger than Giovanni.Footnote 72 In both the 1550 and 1568 editions, Vasari writes that the Venetian Senate decided to send Gentile to the Ottoman court in Constantinople because Giovanni was too old.Footnote 73 During the course of the nineteenth century, amid general questioning of Vasari as a reliable source, art historians both adduced Francesco Negro’s account that Gentile was born first and began to reverse the order of their birth.Footnote 74 Gentile’s art seemed more archaic.Footnote 75 Moreover, it was Gentile who inherited Jacopo’s drawings and control of Jacopo’s workshop in San Geminiano.Footnote 76 Thus many scholars began to doubt and then discard Vasari’s claim, and suggested instead that Giovanni was younger than Gentile, a proposal that became widely accepted in the twentieth century.
The scholars who have argued that Giovanni was younger than Gentile Bellini (b. 1429 or later) have used a number of reasons to justify their proposals.Footnote 77 First, as mentioned, a contemporary Venetian source, the humanist Francesco Negro, referred to Gentile as “maior natu,” or born first, when both Giovanni and Gentile were still alive.Footnote 78 Second, Jacopo Bellini, in his Gattamelata altarpiece of 1460, signed the work with his own name followed by that of Gentile and finally Giovanni, who as a consequence has been presumed the younger.Footnote 79 And third, in what has been identified by some scholars as a group portrait of the extended Bellini family of painters by Gentile Bellini, it has been suggested that the kneeling figures were depicted in order of descending age: Jacopo Bellini, Leonardo Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, Gentile Bellini, and finally Giovanni, presumably the youngest of the group (fig. 3).Footnote 80
Figure 3. Gentile Bellini. Miracle at the Bridge of San Lorenzo, detail, 1500. Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia. Photo credit: Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.
Much of the above evidence for supposing that Gentile was older, however, may be interpreted otherwise or should be considered alongside contradictory evidence. First, Francesco Negro’s description of Gentile as maior natu must be weighed against that of Jacopo Filippo Foresti (1434–1520), who, in his regularly updated Supplementum chronicarum, described Gentile in 1503 as the younger brother (Gentilis minimus frater), also when both Giovanni and Gentile were still alive.Footnote 81 Second, in signing Gentile’s name directly after his own in the Gattamelata altarpiece, Jacopo might have been displaying a natural familial preference for his son-by-blood and the future inheritor of his workshop, or perhaps was merely recording Gentile’s possibly more sizeable contribution to the altarpiece. And third, the argument that Gentile depicted the Bellini family — if that is who they are, which is hardly certain — according to birth order presupposes that Giovanni was the youngest, when the arrangement more likely defies a simple algorithmic explanation.Footnote 82 In short, there is no conclusive evidence that Gentile was the elder.
8. Giovanni’s Family Relations in the Sources
The most significant challenges to the conclusions of this article would come from the many primary sources that described Giovanni Bellini as Jacopo’s son or Gentile’s brother or Mantegna’s brother-in-law. For instance, Giovanni Bellini witnessed a testament in 1459, “Giovanni, son of master Jacopo Bellini”; he was named in his securitatis carta of 1485, in which he acknowledged receipt of his wife’s dowry, as “Giovanni, son of the deceased Jacopo”; and he witnessed a contract in 1487 as “Giovanni Bellini, painter, son of the deceased master Jacopo.”Footnote 83 Jacopo Bellini signed the Gattamelata altarpiece of 1460 as a work by him and his sons Gentile and Giovanni.Footnote 84 In his will of 18 February 1507, Gentile described Giovanni as “my dearest brother.”Footnote 85 And several contemporary and later observers, including the aforementioned Foresti, Negro, and Vasari, as well as Sanudo and Isabella d’Este, among others, described Giovanni as either Gentile’s brother or Jacopo’s son or Mantegna’s brother-in-law.Footnote 86
There are at least two reasons why Giovanni might have been considered Jacopo’s son and Gentile’s brother. First, as has been suggested, Jacopo Bellini might have adopted Giovanni. In legal documents in Renaissance Venice, notaries often referred to adopted sons simply as sons, and hence it is sometimes impossible to determine from them whether a child was adopted or biological. For instance, the 1440 Bellini divisio was witnessed by “Ercole, son of the deceased Jacobello de Fiore.”Footnote 87 In another legal document Ercole likewise was described as “son of master Jacobello de Fiore.”Footnote 88 Ercole was referred to as Jacobello’s “adopted son,” however, in Jacobello’s last will of 2 October 1439.Footnote 89 When Ercole’s adopted status was integral to the legal document, it needed to be mentioned. Theoretically, adopted sons were always identified as such in their adoptive fathers’ testaments because, under the law, their inheritance rights differed from those of legitimate sons.Footnote 90 Jacopo Bellini’s will would undoubtedly clarify his biological relationship to Giovanni and whether he had, in fact, adopted him, but unfortunately no will of Jacopo’s has been found.
The alternate, and perhaps more likely possibility — because if Jacopo had indeed been instated as Giovanni’s legal guardian, there might have been no compelling reason to adopt him — is that Jacopo had raised Giovanni as his son from a very young age, perhaps infancy, and in such a manner that Giovanni was accepted by family and community as Jacopo’s son without the formality of legal adoption. As demonstrated in the case of Jacobello’s adopted son Ercole, written or inscribed personal names in fifteenth-century Northern Italy, as elsewhere in Western Europe during the Renaissance, did not always convey biological fact. They might also project how a person was known, or desired to be known, by his community.Footnote 91 For instance, a Renaissance Venetian painter named Vittore, son of Matteo, who had worked with Giovanni Bellini for a number of years, decided to call himself Vittore Belliniano, and was referred to as such, rather than as Matteo’s son, in legal documents that included his own will and even that of his mother.Footnote 92 In the early fifteenth century, when most Venetians did not have surnames and when most births were not officially recorded, Renaissance Venetian notaries evidently were given a degree of latitude when identifying individuals in legal documents, when doing so did not conflict with the expressed purposes of the document itself.
After his father Nicolò’s death, Giovanni must have been taken into the household of his much older half-brother, Jacopo, where he was trained by him to be a painter, and in all probability was treated by the Bellini family and local community as Jacopo’s own son and Gentile’s brother. Decades later, when Giovanni witnessed a will, acknowledged receipt of his wife’s dowry, and witnessed a contract, the notaries described him as Jacopo’s son, apparently recording his communal rather than biological identity, which in these cases (unlike the 1440 divisio) had no direct bearing on the legal function of the documents.
Jacopo’s inscription on the Gattamelata altarpiece naming Giovanni as his son does not prove that they were biologically father and son; rather, it registers that Jacopo had accepted Giovanni as his son, whether legally adopted or not. Contemporary or later observers, including Foresti, Negro, Sanudo, Isabella d’Este, Vasari, and others, were presumably only aware of Giovanni’s communal identity as Jacopo’s son, which of course meant that he was Gentile’s brother and Mantegna’s brother-in-law. Most of these observers surely imagined him to be Jacopo’s legitimate son. They never suggested that Giovanni was adopted or illegitimate (or not Jacopo’s son); yet Giovanni was almost certainly one of these because legitimate sons had to be mentioned in wills, and Anna’s last will omitted him. The aforementioned and other contemporary and near-contemporary observers accepted, or at least chose to record, Giovanni’s well-established communal identity.
In Gentile’s last testament (he was reported buried five days later on 23 February 1507), he referred affectionately to Giovanni as “dearest brother,” an appellation that would not have conflicted with the function of the document. The two had grown up as brothers, had considered each other brothers, and had been known throughout their lives, in and outside of Venice, as brothers — which represented a shared experience in excess of seventy-five years that Gentile could hardly be expected to set aside in order to privilege on his deathbed their strict biological relationship, and thus refer to Giovanni as “my dearest uncle.”Footnote 93
9. Ramifications
Keith Christiansen has written, “The problem with opting for an early birth date — and to my mind it is an insurmountable one — is that it leaves a full decade of activity in the 1450s with hardly any works.”Footnote 94 The problem of situating Giovanni’s birth year in 1424/28, however, is not insurmountable. Because of the nature of Venetian family workshops, a number of artists worked in relative obscurity during the first decade of their professional life. In 1916 Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), who dated Gentile’s birth to 1429 and Giovanni’s to ca. 1430, proposed that the artists’ “delayed maturity” and the “exceeding scarcity of their earlier works, were in each case due to the same cause, namely that they had had no independent career till they were middle-aged men, because they remained until then in their father’s employ as his assistants.”Footnote 95 From the 1440s to the 1460s Jacopo completed a number of major commissions that required assistants: Giovanni and Gentile probably assisted him on a now-lost narrative cycle of seventeen scenes from the New Testament that had decorated the Sala Capitolare in the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista;Footnote 96 sometime after 1444 Jacopo executed a series of paintings, now destroyed, for the Albergo of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, presumably another multi-year project involving assistants;Footnote 97 in 1460, as noted earlier, Jacopo signed the Gattamelata altarpiece with his own name followed by that of Gentile and Giovanni;Footnote 98 and Giovanni and Jacopo, perhaps with Gentile, executed four triptychs for Santa Maria della Carità from 1460 to 1464, Giovanni himself completing much or all of the polyptych depicting Saint Sebastian on the central panel.Footnote 99
Other Venetian artists similarly worked for a long time in family workshops. Alvise Vivarini (ca. 1442/53–1503/05) was probably about thirty when he commenced his independent career in ca. 1476. He either spent his early years as his father Antonio’s assistant or else began his vocation late.Footnote 100 The sculptor Antonio Lombardo (ca. 1458–ca. 1516), who had moved to Venice as a boy, executed his first documented independent commission in 1500–04, apparently in his forties. “His earlier career,” wrote Sarah Blake McHam, “which probably spanned about fifteen years, had been spent in the family workshop collaborating on commissions awarded his father, Pietro.”Footnote 101 Gentile Bellini (1429/35–1507) has no extant works securely datable to the 1450s. He probably began his independent career in the early to mid-1460s at age thirty or slightly older.Footnote 102 Indeed, the birthdate of most Venetian artists in this period is unknown.Footnote 103 Hence the normative age at which a typical Venetian Quattrocento artist who was raised in his family’s workshop would commence an autonomous career remains unclear. Giovanni’s apparent “delayed maturity” would seem to have been unexceptional in the Quattrocento Venetian workshop.
Despite Christiansen’s statement, a number of scholars have argued that Giovanni’s independent career had, in fact, commenced by the early 1450s. In 1949 Giuseppe Fiocco, recognizing the conflict between Giovanni’s omission from Anna Rinversi’s last testament and the artist’s apparent legitimate status, argued that he must therefore have been Jacopo’s offspring from a previous, unknown marriage (or a legitimated son from a previous liaison), and hence born ca. 1425 but certainly “before 1429, when Jacopo’s wife [Anna] was already pregnant with her first son, Gentile.”Footnote 104 Roberto Longhi, accepting that birthdate, proceeded to date many of Giovanni’s early known works to the 1450s. Thus he placed the Amsterdam Madonna (fig. 4) between 1450 and 1455, a work that had been previously dated to ca. 1460 or slightly later.Footnote 105
Figure 4. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Child, ca. 1455. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.
Longhi’s proposed chronology was informed by an ulterior motive: to reverse the lines of artistic influence that ran from Mantegna to Bellini, because, he declared, “today, for all of us, Giovanni Bellini stands higher as an example of independence of spirit than Mantegna and, a fortiori, than every other Venetian or Paduan contemporary.”Footnote 106 Since most Bellini specialists believe that Mantegna was the leading participant in his early artistic duologue with Bellini, Longhi’s ideological stance may have made it easier to reject his proposed chronology. In any event, from the 1950s to the 1990s, most scholars assumed that Bellini was born later, in the early to mid-1430s.Footnote 107 Rona Goffen (1944–2004), for instance, argued for a birth year of 1433/36, yet maintained that Giovanni’s independent career had commenced by the early 1450s, or even the late 1440s, but that his early works still had been strongly influenced by Mantegna.Footnote 108
In 1990, Mauro Lucco argued that Giovanni was born toward ca. 1440 and commenced his independent career in ca. 1459.Footnote 109 He dated the Amsterdam Madonna, which Longi contended was executed in the early 1450s, to 1460 or soon thereafter.Footnote 110 In the past decade many leading scholars have come to believe that such a chronology, or one similar, not only reflects the available visual and documentary evidence, but also provides the framework for a more plausible development of the artist’s style from the late 1450s into the 1460s. Lucco’s proposed chronology seemed more and more to be achieving consensus.Footnote 111
Thus it probably came as quite a surprise to these and likeminded scholars when the eminent art historian Luciano Bellosi (1936–2011), in an essay on the young Giovanni Bellini for the catalogue of the 2008 Mantegna exhibition at the Louvre, resituated many of Bellini’s works from the 1460s or later back to the 1450s. Bellosi argued that four miniatures in the Marcello manuscript of the life of St. Maurice (figs. 5– 8), firmly dated to 1453, were early works by Giovanni, an attribution that had been proposed in 1968 by Giles Robertson, affirmed to some extent by Lightbown in 1986 and Eisler in 1989, but which in recent years had become less plausible as Bellini’s generally accepted birth year moved toward 1440.Footnote 112 With the Marcello illuminations as his point of departure, Bellosi reconstructed Giovanni’s early stylistic development, dating the Amsterdam Madonna to ca. 1456–57 and situating Bellini’s birth year in ca. 1430.Footnote 113 In contrast to Longhi, however, Bellosi emphatically affirmed Mantegna’s influence over much of Giovanni’s production in the 1450s, while at the same time suggesting that Mantegna might also have benefited from a cross-fertilization of artistic ideas in his more Bellinesque works, such as the figure of Santa Giustina in his San Luca Altarpiece. Footnote 114
Figure 5. Giovanni Bellini (?). Chapter of the Order of the Crescent, 1453. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms. 940, fol. Cv. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 6. Giovanni Bellini (?). Saint Maurice, 1453. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms. 940, fol. 34v. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 7. Giovanni Bellini (?). Allegory of Venice, 1453. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms. 940, fol. 39. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 8. Giovanni Bellini (?). Jacopo Antonio Marcello, 1453. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms. 940, fol. 38v. Photo credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
If the present article’s proposed birth range of 1424/28 comes to be accepted, then specialists who have supported a later date for Bellini’s birth will need to reconsider, at least in some combination, whether Giovanni might have remained an assistant in Jacopo’s workshop for longer than they had imagined, his autonomous career perhaps commencing when the artist was in his mid- to late twenties or even early thirties (and thus conceivably in ca. 1458/59, as Lucco has maintained); and whether scholars such as Longhi, Goffen, and Bellosi were correct to date a number of Giovanni’s independent paintings to the 1450s, especially, of course, if one accepts the Marcello illuminations (1453) as autograph. It seems unlikely, however, that Longhi’s endeavor to exalt Giovanni to the position of primary determinant in his artistic association with Mantegna will ever be widely accepted, and Goffen and Bellosi have arguably demonstrated that, even by placing a number of Giovanni’s works a decade or so earlier, it need not be.
On the other end of Bellini’s life, it may be difficult for some to believe that the artist could have executed late works such as the National Gallery’s Feast of the Gods (1514) when he was well into his eighties, but thus it seems to be. After all, Titian (ca. 1485/90–1576) continued to execute masterpieces such as his final Pietà (ca. 1570–76) well into his eighties, and the numerous productive octogenarians in the history of the visual arts include Picasso, who was famously prolific during his last years until his death at ninety-one.Footnote 115
10. Conclusion
Raised in Jacopo’s household, perhaps even from infancy, Giovanni grew up as Jacopo’s own son and Gentile’s brother. If the Bellini themselves, from Giovanni’s childhood, referred to Giovanni as a son or a brother, then there is no reason to imagine that anyone outside their family would have known otherwise. Inasmuch as their own contemporaries believed Giovanni and Gentile to be brothers, wrote of them in letters as brothers, described them in chronicles and extolled them in poetry as brothers, they have entered the history books incontrovertibly as brothers and as sons of Jacopo Bellini.
Nevertheless, Giovanni lived neither like Jacopo’s son nor like Gentile’s brother. While Jacopo was alive, Gentile remained in Jacopo’s home in the parish of San Geminiano, as expected from an unemancipated son, while Giovanni, as has been argued, was emancipated when his biological father, Nicolò, died, and thus was able to move out of the Bellini household by 1459 to establish his own residence while continuing ties with Jacopo’s workshop. Nor when Jacopo died was Giovanni treated as a biological son. Rather, it was Gentile who took over Jacopo’s workshop and inherited Jacopo’s notebooks and all his paintings, drawings, marbles, reliefs, and plaster casts, as well as all the tools and instruments pertaining to the workshop.Footnote 116 Had Giovanni been Jacopo’s legitimate son, the law would have provided him with a share of Jacopo’s estate, but no evidence suggests that Giovanni inherited either such a share, or offsetting funds, or anything whatsoever from Jacopo. Only through the analysis of legal documents — and not through how the Bellini described each other or were described by their community — are their blood relationships able to be traced.
Appendix: Two Legal Documents Concerning the Bellini Family
Document 1 (fig. 1). 13 September 1440. Charter of division between the brothers Giovanni and Jacopo Bellini, sons of the deceased Nicolò, both residing in the parish of San Geminiano: ASV, CIN, b. 149, Vittore Pomino, reg. “Protocollum mei Victoris Pomino notarii de 1439,” c. 55v.Footnote 1
MCCCCXL, die 13 septembris, indicione quarta.
Licet divisio que fit inter fratres et cetera. Hinc est quod nos Iohannes Belino et Iacobus Belino fratres ac filii quondam ser Nicolai de confinio Sancti Iuminiani ne ullo umquam tempore aut quovis errore scandalum sive discordia oriri posit, ymo potius omnis iurgiorum materia tollatur a nobis plenam et irrevocabilem securitatem facimus nos Iohannes et Iacobus Belino suprascripti cum nostris heredibus et successoribus nobis invicem vicisim, de tota nostra fraterna societate quam simul habuimus et habemus, et de cuncto et super toto havere nostro magno vel parvo et de omnibus et singulis denariis et aliis quibuslibet bonis rebusque mobilibus quecumque nobis habere pertinuerunt tam paterno quam materno, fraterno vel alio quocumque iure aut ex aliqua propinquitate aut ratione vel causa tam tacita quam expressa, necnon quod et insimul vel absentes habuimus vel acquisivimus aut lucrati fuimus ante obitum, ad obitum et post obitum suprascripti defuncti patris nostri, vel quod nos invicem vicisim per quodvis modum vel ingenium requisivimus vel requirere potuimus ab initio usque ad diem presentem cum cartis et sine cartis, per curiam et extra curiam iuste quoque vel iniuste. Nunc autem quia ammodo in antea intendimus nos a fraterna nostra divisos esse et penitus segregatos, nos invicem vicisim videlicet unus alterum et e converso securos reddimus pariter et quietos quia nihil modo remansit quo amplius ab invicem compelli seu requiriri valeamus sive velimus per ullum ingenium sive modum et ideo reddentes omnino nos invicem tacitos et quietos atque de portione unicuique nostrum perventa contentos promittimus invicem vicisim unus alterum et e converso non provocare ad aliquam aliam divisionem fiendam nec dicere vel allegare quemque nostrum fuisse deceptum. Etiam si in futurum quis nostrum devenirit ad fortunam pinguiorem, promittentes preterea invicem vicisim de cetero nos aut quoscumque nostrum heredes et successores nostros de lucris et utilitatibus quomodolibet perventis et ammodo in antea perventuris non requirere vel aliqualiter molestare occasione dicte nostre fraterne ullo ingenio sive modo, quia omnium eorum que quilibet nostrum fecerit prode utilitas sive damnum, absque ulla parte utilitatis vel damni exinde in alium perveniendis, debent vigore huius nostre segregationis et divisionis in eum qui ea fecerit et habuerit pacto expresso totaliter devenire. Si igitur et cetera.
Testes ser Ludovicus de Rigis ser Iacobi de confinio Sancte Iustine; ser Hercules quondam ser Iacobi de Flore pictoris de confinio Sancte Agnetis.
1440, 13 September, fourth indiction.
The division that is to occur between the brothers is lawful, etc. Henceforth it is that we Giovanni Bellini and Jacopo Bellini of the parish of San Geminiano, brothers and sons of the deceased ser Nicolò, in order that no quarrel or disagreement may arise at any time or from some error, or indeed that every matter of dispute may be removed from us, we the abovementioned Giovanni and Jacopo Bellini make a full and irrevocable settlement, along with our heirs and successors, to each of us mutually in turn concerning our entire fraternal partnership that together we had and have, and concerning the whole and over every part of our assets large or small, and concerning all and each piece of money, and any other property and moveable goods, and whatever happened to belong to us, by right of paternal, maternal, fraternal, or any other relationship, or for any reason or cause, whether tacit or expressed, and whatever either jointly or separately we possessed, acquired, or gained, either before, or at, or after the death of our deceased father mentioned above, or that we mutually in turn by whatever manner or means claimed or could claim from the beginning to the present day, with or without documents, by or without judicial action, justly and also unjustly. Now, therefore, because from this moment forward we intend to be divided and entirely separated from our fraternal partnership, we mutually in turn, that is to say, each to the other, and the converse, together render each other secure and satisfied because nothing now remains by which we can or could be further compelled or required by any means or manner. And therefore declaring ourselves mutually and completely calm and satisfied, we promise mutually in turn, each to the other, and the converse, to be satisfied with the portion that each of us has received and not to undertake to initiate any other division, nor to state or claim that either of us has been deceived. And if in the future either of us may come into or will have come into richer fortune, we mutually in turn, as well as each of our heirs and our successors, promise in the future not to claim or in any way dispute anything from the profits and advantages howsoever attained or to be attained henceforth, by reason of our aforementioned fraternal partnership, by any means or manner. Because any profit, advantage, or loss from everything that either of us has made, with no part of the profit or loss therefrom going to the other, must by force of our separation and division entirely turn to the one who has made and received them according to the terms of this agreement. If in this case etc.
Witnesses: ser Ludovico di Rigis, son of ser Jacopo, of the parish of Santa Giustina; ser Ercole, son of the deceased ser Jacobello del Fiore, painter of the parish of Sant’Agnese.Footnote 2
Document 2 (fig. 2). 23 July 1429. Jacopo Bellini acknowledges receipt of his wife Anna’s dowry of 250 gold ducats, or twenty-five lire di grossi a oro: ASV, CIN, b. 212, T. de Tomei, 23 luglio 1429.Footnote 3
1429 mensis iulii …
die XXIII. Plenam et irrevocabilem securitatem facio ego Iacobus Belino pictor filius quondam ser Nicoleti Belino de confinio Sancti Geminiani cum meis heredibus tibi Anne filie quondam ser Branche Dinversis uxori mee dilecte et tuis successoribus de tota illa tua repromissa magna vel parva que tempore nostre disponsationis et contractationis nostri matrimonii pro te mihi dari promissa fuit. Que vero repromissa fuit ducati ducenti quinquaginta auri videlicet libre viginti quinque grossorum ad aurum. Nunc autem et cetera.
Testes vir nobilis ser Franciscus de Molino quondam ser Ieronimi Sancte Marie Magdalene et ser Bartholomeus de Aventuratis, gastaldus dominorum procuratorum ecclesie Sancti Marci.
1429 July 23
I, Jacopo Bellini, a painter residing in the parish of San Geminiano and son of the deceased ser Nicoletto Bellini, make a full and irrevocable acquittance along with my heirs, to you my beloved wife Anna, daughter of the deceased ser Branca Rinversi, and to your successors, concerning your full dowry, great or small, which at the time of our betrothal and contracting of our marriage was promised to be given to me on your behalf. Indeed that dowry was 250 gold ducats, that is to say, twenty-five lire di grossi of gold. Now also etc.
Witnesses: the nobleman ser Francesco da Molin, son of the deceased ser Girolamo, of Santa Maria Maddalena; and ser Bartolomeo Aventurati, steward of the lord procurators of the Church of San Marco.Footnote 4
