Genius of Jacopo Bellini

Pioneer of the early Renaissance style in 15th-century Venice, Bellini worked with a fervor and immediacy never before seen in northern Italian art. His surviving paintings--deeply expressive Madonnas, murals, altarpieces--balance the physical and metaphysical and fuse Gothic, Byzantine and Renaissance elements in strikingly personal ways. A magnificent visual feast and a monumental feat of scholarship, this study by New York University art professor Eisler brings together for the first time all of Bellini's known paintings and some 300 drawings, newly photographed for this volume. Bellini's noble lions and cheetahs glow in the new light of humanism; his nudes are frank affirmations of being; his story-telling pictures are cinematic; and his wide-angled panoramas of cityscapes, funerals, chivalrous adventure and everyday activities capture Venetian life in its astonishing diversity. (Dec.)