Hurry! Show Ends 27th January

A subtle game of contrasts ensues comparing the delicacy of Mantegna’s Egg Tempera to the swarthy fleshy seduction of Bellini’s Oil Painting Technique: ‘The Presentation of Christ in the Temple’ by Giovanni Bellini, about 1470–1475 ( Fondazione Querini Stampalia Onlus, Venezia )

These two brothers in-law struck up a productive dialogue which spurred the other to greater heights. Mantegna was the brilliant talent that came from nowhere and wowed everyone with his daringly advanced use of perspective, with his he added greater spiritual and psychological depth creating spaces of deep reverberations. Bellini in his turn was from a dynasty of tasteful and correct Venetian painters, these insiders answered the demand for pictorial simplicity. It’s Bellini’s taste for creating landscapes and readiness to adopt the then new medium of oil paint which marks him out.

This exhibition offers an excellent reassessment of primacy of the two,  tradition held that Bellini is the better but here I think Mantegna is blindingly  triumphant!

Mantegna is amazing with his deep resonating reds and extreme minimalism of material, nearly any craquelure in his Saint Mark the Evangelist approx 1448, only in the white highlights, the architectural features and the inky black background! I’d been looking at it for more than an hour and not even moved through the exhibition yet! Sadly I know exactly how it’s possible to painting something like this at 17 & just how far the dribble of modern education let’s us get puts us out of reach simply in terms of time and confidence in youth or anything know by hand.

The contrast of the fine brush strokes of egg tempera vs oil painting constantly arrest you move through the show. Egg tempera supposedly made defunct by the arrival of oil paint looks magical, producing the crispist lines and the most brilliant jewel like colours, it said that pigments only improve over time suspended in this medium. While Bellini use of Oil sometime looks like a blurry cop out, take the example of the respective white beards of Simeon who is about to utter the prayer Nuc Dimittis, which prophesied the redemption of the world by Jesus. 

Limbo by Mantegna is a most fine painting in terms of its drawing, its deep resonate darker pigments and its burning jewel like quality of its brighter primaries. Somehow this work would be unimaginable in oil paint, there would be something too glib to quick about it,

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/mantegna-and-bellini

 

NATIONAL GALLERY

Mantegna and Bellini Exhibition

1 October 2018 – 27 January 2019