According to Vasari, oil-painting reached Venice through Antonello da Messina, who had learned the art in the Netherlands.  But that cannot be true.  It came to Venice from Verona or Padua long after Florence could boast many fine masters, the delay being due to the circumstance that the Venetians thought more of architecture than the sister art.  The first painters to make any success in Venice were the Vivarini of Murano.  The next were Giovanni Bellini and Gentile his brother, who arrived from Padua about 1460, the one to paint altar-pieces in the Tuscan manner (for there is little doubt that the sweet simplicity and gentle radiance of the Giotto frescoes in the chapel of the Madonna dell’Arena, which the Paduans had the privilege of seeing for two or three generations before Squarcione was born, had greater influence than either Jacopo Bellini or Mantegna); and the other to paint church pageants, such as we saw in an earlier room.

Giovanni remained in Venice till his death, in 1516, at the ripe age of ninety, and nearly to the end was he both a busy painter and an interested and impressionable investigator of art, open to the influence of his own pupil Giorgione, and, when eighty, being the only painter in Venice to recognize the genius of Duerer, who was then on a visit to the city.  Duerer, writing home, says that Bellini had implored him for a work and wanted to pay for it.  “Every one gives him such a good character that I feel an affection for him.  He is very old and is yet the best in painting.”

In his long life Bellini saw all the changes and helped in their making.  He is the most varied and flexible painter of his time, both in manner and matter.  None could be more deeply religious than he, none more tender, none more simple, none more happy.  In manner he was equally diverse, and could paint like a Paduan, a Tuscan, a Fleming, a Venetian, and a modern Frenchman.  I doubt if he ever was really great as we use the word of Leonardo, Titian, Tintoretto, Mantegna; but he was everything else.  And he was Titian’s master.

The National Gallery is rich indeed in Bellini’s work.  We have no fewer than ten pictures that are certainly his, and others that might be; and practically the whole range of his gifts is illustrated among them.  There may not be anything as fine as the S. Zaccaria or Frari altar-pieces, or anything as exquisite as the Allegories in the Accademia and the Uffizi; but after that our collection is unexcelled in its examples.

[Illustration:  MADONNA AND CHILD FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI In the Accademia]