Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Giovanni Bellini is considered one of the most important figures in Italian Renaissance art. This text considers the artist's work both stylistically and in full cultural and historical context.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The primacy of Giovanni Bellini in the history of Venetian Renaissance painting is indisputable. In an exquisite series of chronologically ordered thematic essays, Goffen scrutinizes Bellini's oeuvre in terms of private and public religious subjects, portraiture, and humanistic and allegorical content. Particularly impressive is the author's capacity to evoke the paintings' formal and emotive nuances along with convincing and complementary readings of their iconographic meaning. While making us acutely aware of the social context for which these works were created, it is nevertheless the masterful articulation of Bellini's chromatic explorations of nature and mood that is this volume's crowning contribution. This amply documented, handsomely produced, and sumptuously illustrated opus is now the essential scholarly meditation on the master.-- Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Goffen's spirited appreciation of Bellini eschews the chronological sequence of the traditional monograph in favor of a two-part division according to function--religious painting and secular painting. The book is handsomely produced with numerous color plates, good detail illustrations, and reconstructions of dismembered works. Goffen has written extensively on Venetian art in context, and the text is laced with references to the social and political order of Renaissance Venice. Welcome features are the extended descriptions of individual works and the conscientious attention to condition. Although not a closely reasoned book, it opens up many angles of Bellini for further consideration and helps indicate just how rich and complex an artist he was. The accessible tone and enticing format will ensure it a broad readership. An important complement to the standard monograph in English by Giles Robertson (Giovanni Bellini, CH, Jan'69) which is rather narrowly focused on issues of chronology and authorship, and a step forward toward the definitive study of Bellini that still waits to be written. College and university libraries. -D. Pincus, University of British Columbia