Bellini Exhibit Opens In Boston

BOSTON

: East meets West in "Gentile Bellini and the East," a special exhibition exploring the rich intersections of cultures in Renaissance Venice on view through March 26 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

It is the first exhibition devoted to the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini, a celebrated artist in his own lifetime, but now often over shadowed by his more famous brother Giovanni.

Gentile Bellini was sent to Istanbul to work for the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1479, after Venice concluded a peace treaty with the Islamic rulers of Turkey. This exhibition investigates this fascinating episode in Venice's history and exhibits, for the first time, all of the works Bellini is known to have made in Turkey, while presenting new findings about the period. The exhibition also addresses wider issues of cultural exchange in the Renaissance.

"Gentile Bellini and the East," organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the National Gallery, London, brings together paintings, drawings, medals and decorative arts from the museums in Kuwait, Hungary, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. The exhibition is on view to March 26 and then travels to The National Gallery, where it will be exhibited from April 12 to June 25. This is the first collaborative exhibition between these two institutions.

"Gentile Bellini and the East" considers the interaction between three cultures - Venetian, Byzantine and Turkish - as well as three religions - Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Islam," says Alan Chong, curator of the collections at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. "Gentile Bellini's interest in these three cultures is a microcosm of Venice's long fascination with the East, and I hope this exhibition will be a compelling and unusual way of approaching the Renaissance."

"Like Gentile Bellini, who left his native Venice for exotic Istanbul, Isabella Gardner traveled to the ends of the world to absorb cultures not her own," says Anne Hawley, Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Gardner Museum. "The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has worked closely with the National Gallery in London to present this intimate and focused look at how one artist was able to bridge cultural barriers and communicate the East, whether Greek or Turkish, to Venice and the West."

In 1479, Gentile was selected by the Venetian Republic to travel to Istanbul - known as Constantinople before its conquest by the Ottomans - to work at the court of Sultan Mehmed II. "This remarkable act of cultural diplomacy reflects the Renaissance conviction that art could foster dialogue and understanding," says Chong. "Gentile was not just a painter visiting an exotic locale, but an ambassador from Venice and a figure instrumental in transferring ideas and culture between East and West."

"Mehmed's request for an Italian painter also shows a rare affinity for Western art and culture," adds Caroline Campbell, co-curator of the exhibition. "The choice of Gentile Bellini by the Venetian Republic indicates the extreme importance of the mission for Venice, as Gentile was then Venice's most prominent painter."

Gentile's work during the 1470s and 1480s is considered his most creative, although his largest works were destroyed in a fire in the Doge's Palace. This has obscured Gentile's important qualities as an artist, thus elevating the historic importance of his work done in Istanbul.

"Gentile Bellini and the East" centers around three great works by Gentile Bellini: the Gardner Museum's intimate portrait, " A Seated Scribe," 1479-81, and the National Gallery's "Portrait of Mehmed II," 1480, and "Cardinal Bessarion with his Reliquary," 1472.

Drawings and other depictions of Eastern subjects, including Caterina Cornaro, the queen of Cyprus, as well as portrait medals and decorative objects show the range of contacts between Venice and the Greek and Islamic worlds in the Fifteenth Century.

The exhibit includes a group of seven drawings made by Bellini in Istanbul and reassembled for the first time since the Sixteenth Century. Similar in pen technique to "A Seated Scribe," the finely detailed and shaded figures have an air of calm composure that was a hallmark of Bellini's studio.

The attribution of these drawings has been the topic of much discussion and some recent writers have assigned the works to an artist called Costanzo da Ferrara, whose only surviving secure works are medals, also shown in the exhibition. However, "Gentile Bellini and the East" argues that the style of drawings is directly related to that of Bellini and his workshop. "Three of the sheets can now be attributed to Bellini himself," says Chong. "Scholars and members of the public will be able to compare the works and test these conclusions." Gentile's self-portrait drawing (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) is also on view.

The exhibit also considers the trade of luxury goods between the Islamic world and Venice. It focuses on one example of this from the age of Bellini - brass vessels decorated with silver inlay.

This traditional Islamic technique, called Damascene, reached a high point in the 1480s, as vessels were specially made for Venetian clients and craftsmen in Venice adopted similar techniques.

The exhibition compares a box made by Mahmud a-Kurdi in what is now Iraq and signed in both Arabic and Latin script (Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London) with a dish in the same technique made in Venice (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston). Also on display is a rare map (Houghton Library, Harvard University), showing Istanbul around 1480 when Gentile Bellini was a resident of the city.

The Gardner Museum is at 280 The Fenway. For information, 617-566-1401 or www.gardnermusuem.org.