Giovanni Bellini[75] was a natural son, but as was the humane Italian custom, taken into his father’s family. He was born about 1430, and his early efforts were completely dominated by Mantegna. Indeed he hardly finds himself artistically until he is fifty, and then he develops a most gracious capacity for growth which ceases only with his death at eighty-five. Of the score of pictures which are Mantegnesque in quality the earliest and most remarkable is the Pietà at Milan, Figure 231. In the tragic power it outdoes Mantegna himself, and with all its hardness, it is more painter-like. The distribution of light and dark is broader, the expression more homely and genuine. Only a little later, perhaps towards 1470, is the Christ on the Mount of Olives, at London, Figure 232. With a very similar picture by Mantegna in the same gallery, it is based on a sketch of Jacopo Bellini’s. Although Giovanni frankly imitates the rigid folds of drapery and landscape from Mantegna, it is with a distinct difference. The mood is gentler, details are less obtrusive, there is an exquisite sense of evening sky, and of hills in gloom, and of the coming of twilight over a river plain. It is the first greatly felt landscape in Venetian painting, and though Giovanni was far to surpass it in fineness and accuracy, even he never excelled it in depth and truthfulness of feeling. The serenity of the eventide is the fitting foil to Our Lord’s single moment of human weakness and despair. [Illustration: FIG. 233. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna.—_Estate Theodore Davis._ ] Giovanni’s early Madonnas are singularly various. We have one very stately and tender in the estate of Theodore M. Davis, Figure 233. The Madonna in the John G. Johnson collection, Philadelphia, is wistful and emaciated. One belonging to Mr. Philip Lehman, New York, is of sensuous, peasant type, while the painting, unlike the soberness of the two earlier ones, shows the utmost resplendence of Mantegnesque enamels. Its date may be about 1470. So we see Giovanni wholly flexible and experimental at forty, and developing chiefly under Mantegna’s influence. Giovanni’s emancipation from Mantegna takes place very gradually. It is virtually complete in the Transfiguration, Figure 234, at Naples which may be dated towards 1480. Bellini asserts himself fully in the gracious monumentality of the chief group, while his Arcadian mood is forecast in the ample landscape softly invested with a colorful light and shade. There is a more specific emotion and a more romantic richness of setting in St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, Figure 207, Frick Collection, which may be a year or two later. These are both Wordsworthian pictures, imbued with a mystical tenderness for natural appearances. Such are the sources from which Giorgione will soon draw his pagan pastoralism. [Illustration: FIG. 234. Giovanni Bellini. The Transfiguration.—_Naples._ ]