Bellini painted the above “Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror” in 1515—at the age of 89.

Like Titian, Bellini tells us that we have a long way to accomplish our life goal. Those Renaissance painters didn’t seem to have a dream of take-it-easy retirement. In fact, their work turned out their paradise of our retirement utopia.

By his work and with his utter open mind, the almost ninety year-old artist succeeded in advancing his affirmation of a new casual sensibility. His young woman, unlike those painted by the artists of the Florentine school (such as Botticelli), shows the beauty and sensuousness of the woman in her sexual prime.

Compared with the big-breasted ideal woman prevailing in the Hollywood silver-screen world, however, she shows a pair of rather modest breasts. Actually, you can hardly find big-bossomed women in the world of Renaissance. The realistic or scientific eyes of the Renaissance artists indeed expressed the actual size without any preoccupation or prejudice.

The Prudence (the naked woman pointing at a mirror) at right was painted in 1490 as one of four allegories.

The four panels with Allegories at the Accademia in Venice are often likened to the Sacred Allegory, but they belong instead to the artist’s scanty secular production.

They originally formed part of a small dressing-table with a mirror and a rack on which to hang objects. The spread of this kind of furniture was so great that in 1489 the Venetian Senate banned the cabinet makers from making such furniture, limiting it to what was strictly necessary.

Often, as in this instance, the decoration reflected a prude or some moralistic character. There are, however, diverging opinions about the interpretation of this allegory. Some saw the woman as Vanitas or Lady Vanity on the basis of similar representations by Jacopo de' Barbari and Baldung Grien.

Note that she has a rather small pair of breasts and a slightly protruding belly—far from the Victorian (or today’s) idealistic hour-glass figure. Nonetheless, it seems to have reflected the true shape of the woman, again, without any preoccupation or prejudice.

Giovanni Bellini, the founder of the Venetian school of painting

Giovanni Bellini raised Venice to a center of Renaissance art that rivaled Florence and Rome. He brought to painting a new degree of realism, a new wealth of subject-matter, and a new sensuousness in form and color.

Giovanni Bellini was born in Venice, Italy. His father, Jacopo, a painter, was a pupil of one of the leading 15th-century Gothic revival artists. Giovanni and his brother Gentile began their careers as assistants in their father’s workshop.

In his early pictures, Bellini worked with tempera, combining a severe and rigid style with a depth of religious feeling and gentle humanity. His first phase as an artist was strongly influenced by his formidable brother-in-law, the Paduan painter Andrea Mantegna, from whom he took a sculpturesque figure style, a sense for the potential eloquence of contour line, and occasional compositional ideas as shown in the early Agony in the Garden (1460s, National Gallery, London), which was the first of a series of Venetian landscape scenes that continued to develop for the next century.

The personal components of Bellini’s style, which became fundamental to the character of Venetian Renaissance painting as a whole, found expanded scope and an altered form in his painting of the 1470s.

His color took on added depth, and he explored the interactions of color, light, air, and substance still more fully. As a result, the distinction between solids and space became less clear. Air began to mediate between them. Contour lines gradually disappeared, to be replaced by transitions of light and shadow.

In 1479 Bellini took his brother’s place in continuing the painting of great historical scenes in the Hall of the Great Council in Venice. During that year and the next he devoted his time and energy to this project, painting six or seven new canvases. These, his greatest works, were destroyed by fire in 1577.

The above Saint Francis in Ecstasy represents an important innovation of Bellini’s in these years—paintings in which mood and meaning are conveyed at least as much by landscape as by figures.

Far behind was the stony wilderness of earlier paintings where hermits wandered through deserts to prove their saintness, and where jagged rocks—borrowed from Byzantine art—reflected nature’s hostility to man. Now man was completely at home in nature. Fantastic rocks, once merely emblems of mountains, were painted as realistic studies of natural formations.

Even portraits showed beyond the sitter’s shoulder as in Mona Lisa, lovingly detailed views of the countryside. It became the custom to use the local landscape as the background. Finally the landscape became important enough to dominate a picture. Florentine landscape painters were factual observers. Bellini, the founder of the Venetian school, began with a realism, modeling precise details of the countryside into luminous idyls.

In the landscapes themselves, Bellini combined a Flemish-inspired minuteness of brilliantly rendered detail with an Italian grasp of general principles as no previous artist had done. The Venetian ideal—tranquil, poetic, and unified by light—eventually became traditional in European art.

In collaboration with his pupil Titian, Bellini painted the above Feast of the Gods (1514, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.)—an involved allegory based on a tale taken from Ovid. The landscape was devised by Titian. Bellini, still flexible and inventive in his 80s, turned to the classical and pagan subject matter shortly before his death in 1516 in Venice.

By the time of Titian, the ideals of humanism had come to dominate all painting.

Titian decorated one room at the court of Alfonso d’Este (younger brother of Isabella d’Este) at Ferrara with three pictures tracing a favorite humanist theme, the evolution of love, and placed the Feast of the Gods on the fourth wall.

One scholar has conjectured that the amorous couple sitting behind a bowl of fruit represents Lucrezia Borgia and her third husband, Alfonso d’Este.

At the end of his career Bellini became one of the greatest landscape painters. His ability to portray outdoor light was so skillful that the viewer can tell not only the season of the year but also almost the hour of the day. Bellini lived to see his own school of painting achieve dominance and acclaim. His influence carried over to his pupils, two of whom became better known than he was: Giorgione (1477?-1510) and Titian (1488?-1576). His younger contemporary, the German painter Albrecht Dürer, wrote of Bellini in 1506: "He is very old, and still he is the best painter of them all." Bellini died in Venice in 1516.

Bellini ushered in the Venetian epoch.

In his 65-year evolution as an artist, he brought Venetian painting from provincial backwardness into the forefront of Renaissance and the mainstream of Western art. Moreover, his personal orientations predetermined the special nature of Venice’s contribution to that mainstream. These include his luminous colorism, his deep response to the natural world, and his warm humanity.