The emergence of the landscape in fifteenth-century painting marks a paradigmatic shift that cannot be sufficiently grasped as either a break with the so-called Middle Ages or a return to antiquity. Landscape depiction in Giovanni Bellini's paintings expresses a new perception of the world and at the same time offers space for traditional values of belief. In paintings with religious themes, Bellini replaced the planar gold ground with depictions of atmospheric landscapes that extend into the depths of the background. It was his unsurpassed achievement to shift landscapes of mountains, lakes, villages, and, above all, the horizon and sky to the moods of different times of day and year and to reproduce the sfumato of humidity, clouds, and so on.

Bellini's landscape backgrounds are forerunners to the progressive aestheticizing of landscape depiction by the likes of Giorgione, Lorenzo Lotto, Titian, and Campagnola. These landscapes were the theme of a fascinating exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (10 October 2017 to 14 January 2018). The book under review documents that exhibition: the very first monographic exhibition in the United States dedicated to this leading artist of the Venetian Renaissance. Thanks to this small but unprecedented show, curated by Davide Gasparotto, the innovative backgrounds of Bellini's paintings have become the focus for the first time. In his excellent essay, Gasparotto presents the evolution and importance of landscape in Giovanni Bellini's work, from the first landscape backgrounds in private devotional works to the emergence of landscape in the official altarpiece. He shines light on the influences of the early Netherlandish painters, especially Jan van Eyck and Dieric Bouts the Elder, and of Bellini's father, Jacopo Bellini. He supplements his discussion of this development with Bellini's view of landscape as fantasia and, above all, of artistic invenzione and poesia, by elaborating on the term from contemporaneous sources, as I have shown: lontani (literally, “distances”), which is the earliest term used for landscapes (Blass-Simmen, 2015). In one of the few surviving letters, Bellini informs Isabella d'Este, an important patron of modern art, that he intends to paint a presepio and “qualche lontani et altra fantaxia” (“some distances and other fantasies”). The term paesaggio emerged later. In the context of Bellini's so-called Sacred Allegory, now in the Uffizi, Gasparotto asks for whom such artworks were created and proposes that this high-quality, large-format painting of a landscape with relatively small figures be seen as one of the first paintings for a sophisticated art lover. In the catalogue entry, Antonio Mazzotta goes a step further by adopting a seductive thesis proposed by Niccolò Rasmo, in 1946, that the Sacred Allegory is the aforementioned, well-documented commission for Isabella d'Este's camerino. Hans Belting also interprets Bellini's depictions of Saint Jerome (three of which were included in the exhibition) in the context of humanist patrons. He sees Bellini's inventions that formulate the contrast of nature and civilization as expressing the patrons’ desire for the vita contemplativa in isolated nature. It is striking, though Belting does not mention it, that the colors of the saint's garments correspond in color and brightness to the greatest distances on the horizon, which gives the compositions an almost lyrical rhythm and points to things beyond representation.

New perspectives on his life and work are presented by Daniel Wallace Maze in his biography of the artist. Maze's thesis is based on a revision to the genealogy of the Bellini family in which Giovanni is not the son but, rather, the half-brother of Jacopo—and, hence, not Gentile Bellini's brother but his uncle—and it proposes an early birthdate for Giovanni, between 1424 and 1428 (first RQ 66.3 [2013]). This thesis cannot be ruled out, but it would require reattributions of the works of Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini that are difficult to imagine. In addition to the introductory texts, there are extensive entries on the individual works in the exhibition by various, in some cases young, scholars that present the current state of scholarship. The Nativity in the Courtauld Gallery, London, which is one of the few surviving study drawings for a landscape, has rightly been reattributed to Giovanni Bellini.

In summary, the texts in this volume have been prepared with careful scholarship, which, unfortunately, is often no longer the case with exhibition catalogues. Inspiring new insights are conveyed. The illustrations, including many wonderful details, are of outstanding quality.