Si proporrà un caso-studio incentrato sul problematico dipinto di Giovanni Bellini del San Francesco nel deserto, ora nella Frick Collection di New York. Anche attraverso la presentazione di nuovi documenti d’archivio e la riflessione su dati non noti, saranno indagati i passaggi collezionistici del quadro, partendo dalle parole di Marcantonio Michiel nel fondamentale manoscritto marciano cinquecentesco della Notizia d’opere di disegno, e compresa la rilevazione di segnali di “pentimenti” nella sua descrizione. Si affronterà il problema della committenza, ancora in parte misteriosa e su cui si avanzano nuove piste di ricerca. Si ragionerà sulla collezione rinascimentale del nobile veneziano Taddeo Contarini, proprietario pure di opere quali i Tre Filosofi di Giorgione. Si rifletterà su agenti e mediatori, e su una serie di fonti riferite alla tavola di Bellini. Si esplorerà una rete di famiglie e personaggi che nel tempo hanno posseduto il San Francesco Frick, anche ricostruendo anelli sinora mancanti.

Metaphors of clothing or veiling pervade the Bible and Christian imagery. Giovanni Bellini tapped into this tradition in a highly nuanced manner in his paintings of Christ. This paper examines how Bellini describes vestments and shrouds. It argues that his artistic reformulation of drapery as furnishing an image as much as clothing a person grew out of his presentations of the body of Christ. Significantly, the body and its integument are often a little detached. Particular attention will be paid to the unusual painting of Christ Blessing, in the Louvre. The feminization of this Christ will be explored and links with the iconography of St Francis proposed. Another focus will fall on the Resurrection from San Michele. Loin-cloths and shrouds in this altarpiece may be compared with Byzantine precedents and related to the Venetian rituals of Holy Week.

The paradigm change in the visual arts that occurred during the fifteenth century, as realized by Giovanni Bellini, arguably followed both observation of nature and change in spirituality, namely from a transcendental system of being and seeing (represented by the gold background) to an observed and lived reality that affected the traditional ways of painting (represented by a new conception of paese in the background). Most especially the sky was given ample space by Bellini, yet in proportion to the landscape. Building on achievements of his Northern and North Italian predecessors, he developed an atmospheric sky that united hitherto separated spheres: the natural realm with the divine realm. As will be argued with focus on Bellini’s Berlin Resurrection, that his is a dramaturgy in paint, whereby natural phenomena (e.g., sunrise, sunset, stormy atmosphere) are deliberately included to emphatically foreground the religious narrative — the main act of the painting.