background. I reproduce it opposite page 266.

And then we move to the room devoted to Giovanni Bellini, performing as
we do so an act of sacrilege, for one cannot pass through the pretty
blue and gold door without interrupting an Annunciation, the angel
having been placed on one side of it and the Virgin on the other.

[Illustration: S. GEORGE
FROM THE PAINTING BY MANTEGNA
_In the Accademia_]

Giovanni Bellini was born in 1426, nearly a century after Giotto died.
His father and teacher was Jacopo Bellini, who had a school of painting
in Padua and was the rival in that city of Squarcione, a scientific
instructor who depended largely on casts from the antique to point his
lessons. Squarcione's most famous pupil was Andrea Mantegna, who
subsequently married Giovanni Bellini's sister and alienated his master.

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 flexibl