Giovanni Bellini

by Roger Eliot Fry, Hilton Kramer, David Alan Brown

Giovanni Bellini is being published for the first time since 1901. Highly popular at the time of its original publication (three editions were published between 1899 and 1901), Roger Fry's monograph was instrumental in rescuing Bellini from the oblivion of a Victorian-era reputation by reinterpreting and revaluing his art for an early twentieth-century audience. Giving a succinct but definitive view of Bellini's career, Fry not only brought to bear the new "scientific" connoisseurship in his analysis of individual pictures and their chronology, but he also brought a keen interest into Bellini's innovative use of semi-transparent oil glazes, the psychological depth of his subjects, and Bellini's profound sensitivity to nature. As a painter himself, Fry had the critical advantage of studying Bellini with a sympathy deepened by his own close awareness of aesthetic problems.
Roger Fry - champion of modernism, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, founder of the Omega Workshops, and author of important monographs on Cezanne and Matisse - thus began his career in the elite but highly competitive group of critics and connoisseurs who were engaged in the massive aesthetic revisionist project of clarifying Italian Renaissance art. Bernard Berenson, the foremost figure in this undertaking, was Fry's mentor. Giovanni Bellini was Fry's first book. It is now available again after almost one hundred years and provides not only an original and compelling view of the Venetian Renaissance master, but also a more complete perspective on the career of Roger Fry.

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasized the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their depicted content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".

Reviews

[GBL · Rating 3 out of 5]

Roger Fry's short examination of the work of Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian painter, highlights the importance of Bellini in the development of Venetian painting and highlights his influence on other painters. The work is detailed in its examination of Bellini's paintings and Fry is keen to determine the chronological order in Bellini's works, establishing his development as an artist.