He
utterly dominates Room 62 of the Sainsbury Wing of the National
Gallery, this steely-eyed man, just as he would once have
dominated the intricately vicious politics of Venice at the turn of
the sixteenth century. I am speaking of Doge Leonardo Loredan, as
depicted by Giovanni Bellini, in a painting said to have been
executed in about 1501, the year that the Doge took office – an
office he was to hold, unbroken, for the next twenty years of almost
ceaseless warfare between the Republic and her many enemies. To call
this portrait arrestingly magnificent is to sell it short. It is one
of the greatest and most startling portraits of the Western canon,
painted by a man, the greatest painter of an entire family of
remarkable painters, who was at the heart of the political and
cultural life of Venice for the duration of his long life –
Giovanni Bellini finally died in 1616, aged 86.
I have a crude rule for testing the worth of any work of art. It is called the Ten-Second Test. If any work of art is worth staring at for as long as ten seconds, it stands a chance. That’s it. Most works of art – and especially those which are being made today under the name of ‘art’ – fail that test miserably. Three seconds, perhaps four, are quite enough. To apply such a test to this portrait of the Doge would be laughable in the extreme. The more you stare at it, the more you become absorbed into the marvellously unsettling richness of its ambiguities. There is the test, you see: this work is inexhaustible. The more you look at it, the more it seems to say to you. In this respect, it resembles a great poem.
Surprisingly for a
secular portrait, the Doge is not in profile, but face-on (well, in
fact, just slightly askance) to the painter and the onlooker – this
face-on mode of depiction, for most of the Middle Ages, was generally
reserved for sacred portraiture. Now a Doge, a mere mortal man, has
been given the treatment once reserved for sacred subjects. And yet
this man was not a king, and even less an absolute monarch - and we
sense and feel this from the way in which Bellini has painted him.
Monarchs more often than not look like over-stuffed balloons. They
have little characterful reality, little genuine solidity. They are
little more than the majestic way in which they are being
represented. Think of Van Dyke’s ridiculous portrait of Charles I
on horseback, for example, recently on display at Tate Britain,
galloping towards us like a bewigged crazy on a pantomime horse, or
of Goya’s glittering dismissals of the Spanish Royal Family whose
court painter he was paid to be. More fools them! These paintings,
for all their visual splendour, are often nothing but gloriously
laughable pieces of puffery. They are lies.
The Doge, on the other
hand, is at least two things at once. He is a human being
spectacularly adorned in the vestments of his office – gorgeously
brocaded mantle worked over, in gold thread, with pineapple motifs
which we can see upside down; a ducal cap – known as a ‘corno’
(an allusion to its single horn) - worn over a linen skull cap - but
he is also the brutally focussed man that he needed to be in order to
negotiate his way through the diplomatic challenges of being Doge of
the Republic of Venice. This face is lean, wary, ascetic - almost to
the point of revealing a slight tendency towards emaciation. A
spiritual man then – but a spiritual man with an iron fist. It is
the face of a master tactician, a diplomat. This is not a fat-faced
Henry.
We are also a little
surprised by the fact that the portrait is relatively modest in size
– portraits of men of importance are usually as large as possible.
This reminds us of the fact that the Doge was a man amongst men,
elected by a committee of 41 aristocrats, perpetually subject to
checks and balances; and a man, moreover, who earned relatively
little from his official duties; who was not allowed to show favours
to members of his own family; and whose rights to own properties
outside the Republic was severely restricted. And yet his ceremonial
functions were extraordinary – and this is why he is tricked out in
such splendour, in robes of such brilliance.
But he ends mid-chest,
and he stands behind a marble balustrade, looking out towards the
Grand Canal or the Piazza San Marco (or, since the middle of the
nineteenth century, towards rivals for his attention at London’s
National Gallery), coolly appraising, almost rigid. Why is he cut off
like this? Why is he not full-length? (By all accounts, he was not a
short man so, unlike, say, Alan Ladd, he did not need to pretend.)
Again, it is all to do with politics. The head-and-torso format of
this portrait reminds us – and, I am sure, quite deliberately so -
of Roman portrait busts. One great empire leads naturally on to
another. It is also an attested fact that the Doge’s family
believed itself to be the direct descendants of a Roman hero called
Caius Mucius Scaevola.
I too am an hero, he is
telling us, a servant of god, a master amongst men, within strictly
defined limits, of course, which I not-so-humbly acknowledge.
Giovanni
Bellini (1530-1616) was one of the greatest of the Venetian painters
of the Renaissance, whose subject matter encompassed sacred themes,
secular portraiture and historical narrative. He pioneered the use of
oil painting, and became celebrated for his tonal range and the
richness of his colour.
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