Analysis of Works of Several Artists

1. Gentile Bellini's Procession of the Relic of the True Cross before the Church of San Marco (1496), at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice is an impressive display of the power of linear perspective as an artistic tool (plate 17-73, Stokstad 671). This painting showed an actual event, a procession of the relic at which, it was claimed, a miracle had happened. Bellini painted many works that "celebrate the daily life of the city" and this painting also celebrates both the importance of religious life and its connection to the power of the city-state (Stokstad 670). The composition is interesting, although it appears very plain at first. The square in front of the Church is an open city center which is enclosed on three sides by the church and other buildings. On the side nearest to the viewer, the buildings cannot be seen but the figures of the monks close it off. Like the buildings, they form a type of architectural presence (their gray figures look like stone and they are very regular and repetitive like architectural decorations). Thus the procession, which stands for the active, public religious life of the city, forms a part of the city elements that surround, and create, the civic center.

Bellini's painting makes an interesting contrast with Pietro Perugino's Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter (1482), at the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome, another work where perspective and a big, open city space play important parts (plate 17-71, Stokstad 669). But

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pers are hoping to have. The feeling of upward motion is quite intense in this fresco because the painter has been clever enough to space out the painted figures among the stucco figures/ The stucco sculptures also contribute to the upward motion, but they are clearly bound to the surfaces of the church ceiling. There is, therefore, a sharp distinction between them and the 'real' figures of the painted people and angels who seem to be drawn up in a whirlpool toward the light where the name of Jesus is indicated by the letters "IHS, a Greek abbreviation for 'Jesus'" (Stokstad 763). The clouds seem to have floated into the church and the figures all seem unaware of the viewers below them. They are all concentrating on the spiritual experience before them -- the greatest experience possible -- and the viewers below must have wanted to be drawn up with them, as the painter planned. Another fresco of this kind is Pietro da Cortona's Triumph of the Barberini (1633-39) at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome (plate 19-17 Stokstad 765). In this painting, however, the painter was not trying to illustrate a religious experience. Instead he was glorifying Pope Urban VIII's family, the Barberini. It is a less successful painting, however,

Category: Arts - A