1500 Stitches: diverse arts of Margaret Wolseley

BELLINI, Giovanni
Portrait of a Young Senator
1485-90

BELLINI, Giovanni
Portrait of a Young Man in Red
1485-90

Part of a cycle about the relic of the True Cross commissioned by the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista in 1494 or 1495. See also additional works by Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Mansueti, Vittore Carpaccio, Lazzaro Batiani and Benedetto Diana.

Writing about Gentile Bellini's Corpus Domini procession in the Piazza in 1496: "Among the stylish young men not yet togati and the patricians, the cittadini , the friars and the clergy, stand groups of foreigners. On the left are Greeks (or Armenians), wearing their hard, square-topped hats and long open gowns; on the right of centre a group of Germans in ample short dark mantles, almost certainly what Venetians referred to as gabbani , and large felt caps."^[1]

Part of a cycle about the relic of the True Cross commissioned by the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista in 1494 or 1495. See also additional works by Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Mansueti, Vittore Carpaccio, Lazzaro Batiani and Benedetto Diana.

"The presence of foreigners in several Venetian paintings of the end of the fifteenth century is very obvious. Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus, both in her portrait in Prague and as painted with her attendant ladies by Gentile Bellini in 1500, wears a type of dress that has very little in common with what was currently being worn in Venice. Bellini, while he naturally gave the queen and the Cypriot ladies a place of honour kneeling along the bank of the canal in the foreground on the left, includes in this painting of a Miracle on the Canal about a dozen ladies of Venice standing behind them. These Venetian beauties are portrayed in the fashionable dress of 1500. The little girl who kneels, with her governess behind her, in the foreground, wears a dress which shows the Venetian fashion in detail. Clerics, members of the Scuola of S. Giovanni Evangelista, Venetian patricians as well as gondoliers are a part of the general scene, as is also a contingent of Venetian knights supporting the queen and her party on the left. The wear their knightly mantles fastened on the right shoulder with a row of buttons. It is the Cypriot group who stand out as members of a foreign country."^[2]

BELLINI, Giovanni
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1500

BELLINI, Giovanni
Portrait of a Man (Pietro Bembo)
1500-05

BELLINI, Giovanni
Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan
1501

BELLINI, Giovanni and Gentile
Sermon of St Mark in Alexandria
1504-07