THE FICTION OF BELLINI'S "TRUTH"

THE FICTION OF BELLINI'S "TRUTH" Author(s): Norman E. Land Source: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Spring 1999), pp. 11-18 Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23205063 . Accessed: 28/06/2014 15:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Source: Notes in the History of Art. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=arsbrevis http://www.jstor.org/stable/23205063?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp THE FICTION OF BELLINI'S TRUTH Norman E. Land There is a wonderful poetry in the fact that Venice, which, like Narcissus, lovingly con templates its own beauty reflected in water, was in the Renaissance a major center for the production of glass mirrors. No wonder, then, that Venetian artists, responding to the example of such Netherlandish painters as Jan van Eyck, were especially attracted to mirrors and represented them in various contexts in their art. Giovanni Bellini, for instance, painted at least two pictures containing a mirror: the Venus with a Mir ror (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which is signed and dated 1515, and his Truth (Self-Knowledge), painted some years earlier (Fig. I).1 Truth belongs to a group of four panels in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. In each of the other three paintings, Bellini represented allegories of Melan choly (Fig. 2), Perseverance (Fig. 3), and Envy (Fig. 4), respectively. These four pan els once adorned a restello—a small piece of furniture meant to hold toilet articles such as combs and brushes. The restello would have contained a relatively large, central mirror around which the panels would have been arranged. Possibly Melancholy (Fig. 2) would have appeared to the upper left, Truth (Fig. 1) to the upper right, Envy (Fig. 4) to the lower right, and Perseverance (Fig. 3) to the lower left.2 Restelli were so popular in Venice that in 1489 the Senate, which considered them a superfluous vanity, forbade their production and sale.3 Nevertheless, in a will dated 1525, the Venetian painter Vincenzo Catena refers to "my restello made of walnut with certain small figures painted in it by the hand of miser Giovanni Bellini."4 Possibly, then, the four panels, including Truth, might have belonged to Catena's restello.5 Scholars have offered a number of inter pretations of the subject matter of this panel, the most convincing of which is that it rep resents a personification of Truth holding the mirror of self-knowledge.6 The woman in the panel, however, is sometimes identi fied as a personification of Prudence or Vanity, each of which is customarily repre sented with a mirror. But unlike other depic tions of Prudence, such as the one by the Master of the E-series Tarocchi, and Vanity, such as the one in Jacopo de' Barbari's engraving of c. 1503-1504, the woman in Bellini's panel does not look into the mirror at which she points.7 In the panel representing Truth holding the mirror of self-knowledge, we encounter a naked woman with flowing hair standing on a pedestal and holding a framed mirror in her right hand. As she looks out at the view er, engaging his attention, she points with her left hand toward the mirror, in which is the reflection of the head and shoulders of a man. The pedestal is composed of a square base on top of which is a cylinder decorated with a carving of the skull of a bull or cow This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Fig. 1 Giovanni Bellini, Truth (Self-Knowledge). Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Giovanni Bellini, Melancholy. Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Giovanni Bellini, Perseverance. Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Giovanni Bellini, Envy. Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 16 with a swag tied to each of its horns. On and around the pedestal stand three putti. The caped and crowned one in the lower right hand corner energetically beats a drum sus pended from his neck. The putto to the left, who wears a short green tunic, stands on the base of the pedestal and blows a long trum pet. Behind him, holding another trumpet, is a naked putto, who, leaning one elbow on the cylinder of the pedestal, gazes at his companion. The female figure and her ped estal stand against the arched brick wall of a small building. To the right of her are two windows opening onto a landscape, while to the left is a door or arch through which light fills the space and illuminates the figures. The vertical band running along the left edge of the painting seems to be a support for another arch and suggests that the struc ture as a whole might be a kind of loggia. The putto's trumpet in the lower left-hand corner illusionistically extends beyond the picture plane, seemingly moving out of the representation and into the space in front of the picture, which space is both literal and fictional. The putto's gesture, although a very limited one, nevertheless extends itself to the viewer, who is implicitly asked to enter the fiction of the painting. The origi nal fifteenth-century viewer might have imagined the sound of the trumpet blaring in his ear as he gazed into the mirror of the restello, waking him to the importance of truth and self-knowledge. This illusionistic representation, in other words, invites us, as it did the original viewer, to respond to the scene imaginatively. Bellini's Truth asks us to imagine our selves standing in front of a wall opposite the female figure and beneath what seems to be the barrel vault of a loggia as we witness three putti celebrating the presence of Truth, who holds a mirror up for our inspection as she points to it. Although we literally stand in a museum in Venice as we gaze at the painting, we are imaginatively situated in its fictional world. Were we to encounter such a bizarre scene in nature, we no doubt would take appropriate action, perhaps calling an emergency rescue service or the police. But we know that we are in the world of art, that we are responding to the invitation in Bellini's painting, and so accept the circum stances of the scene as appropriate to its world. The fiction of Bellini's painting includes the fiction of a world within a world. Mirrors, of course, reflect whatever hap pens to be in front of them. In the instance of Bellini's Truth, the mirror reflects the head and shoulders of a man who is dressed in red and is standing in a dark space. The nature of this space, however, is indetermi nate. The patch of light on the mirror's sur face might be a reflection of the light shin ing into the loggia from the left, or it might represent a window in a dark room behind the figure. In either case, the mirror reflects a space that is seemingly not continuous with the space of the loggia because we see nothing of it or its inhabitants in the glass. We can imagine the original owner—the actual flesh-and-blood person, who was perhaps the painter Catena—standing be fore his restello and examining his face in an actual mirror. One fiction of the painting, then, is that the mirror reflects this man, who has turned as a result of the trumpet blast, from the literal mirror in the restello to view Bellini's panel.8 There he encoun tered the illusion that he was in a loggia inhabited by a nude woman and three putti, and he would seem to peer into another, much smaller, mirror. This imaginative par ticipation would have seemed to be in some way connected to the knowledge of truth This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 17 about oneself. As he gazed into Bellini's illusionistic mirror, he would have seen it and the woman holding it as a symbol and a personification of self-knowledge and truth, respectively. As a result of this turning of his head, the mundane act of surveying his image in the actual mirror of the restello would have been transformed into, or over laid with, the morally useful admonition to know himself. The generalized face of the man in the mirror is clearly not a portrait of a specific individual, and we may assume that the panel was seen by people other than the per son who originally owned the restello. If someone other than the original owner had peered into the panel, he or she may not have seen the figure in the mirror as an illu sion of his or her own reflection. Because a mirror will reflect whatever is in front of it, those viewers might have seen the fiction of the painting in another way. They might have assumed that the mirror reflects the image of an imaginary man who is standing in front of the picture in an imagined space, one that is not continuous with the space of the picture. Here we have a circumstance in which the work of art, or a portion of it, reflects an imaginary viewer; indeed, through the reflection, the panel, in a sense, creates its own viewer. The viewer sees not himself, but an image of himself as a view er in the work of art. Another fiction of the panel, then, is that it creates itself as a work of art. By depict ing a viewer standing in another space in front of it, the panel asserts its identity as a work of art. Within this fiction, the relation between the actual viewer and the work of art changes in a number of ways. For exam ple, the trumpet illusionistically extends beyond the space of the panel into the space of the viewer in the mirror and not into our actual space. In fact, we as viewers are excluded from immediate participation in the work of art. We are forced to stand imag inatively outside both the space of the panel and the space in front of it (as implied by the image in the mirror) in order to see the two as a fictional whole. The viewer becomes a kind of all-seeing god, surveying from a distance the artist's creation, but also hold ing it together, making it a whole, in his imagination. If Bellini were the only artist to employ a mirror in the way described, we might dis miss his use of the object as a curious and enchanting, albeit isolated, example of visu al wit. But that is not the case. Jan van Eyck uses the famous mirror in his double portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and Jeanne Cenami (National Gallery, London) to similar effect. One fiction of van Eyck's painting is that the viewer stands in a bedroom gazing at the couple as they look back at him. The mirror on the far wall, however, denies that fiction and asserts through its reflection that two other people are standing in the room and are the object of the couple's gaze. Again, the viewer, though still literally seeing the painting, becomes absent or "displaced" once he or she begins imaginatively to par ticipate in it. In one very important respect, however, van Eyck's painting differs significantly from Bellini's. In van Eyck's painting, the mirror reflects the presence of two figures at the back of the room. The viewer literally sees the room through van Eyck's eyes— this is his perception of the room—but ac cepting the fiction of the mirror, we realize that we see the Arnolfini as the two figures in the doorway behind us see them. The viewer is godlike in the sense that he can see the entire room in his imagination, includ ing the portion reflected by the mirror. As an This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 18 imaginative viewer, he stands invisibly in the space between the Arnolfini in front of him and the two figures behind him, between the depicted and the imagined, uniting them. In a sense, van Eyck painted the viewer out of his picture just as, except in his signature, he denied his own presence in the depicted room. And what of Bellini in relation to his painting of Truth (Fig. 1)? How did he respond to the picture once he had complet ed it, once he became a viewer, too, momen tarily losing his special status as creator? For Bellini (and for Catena, if he was the original owner), the mirror of Truth would also have been the mirror of art, reminding him (and us) that painting is not nature, but a reflection of nature, a depiction of an imaginary realm that, in one way or anoth er and to one degree or another, resembles nature. Painting, as writers on art often assert, is also an image of its creator, both physically as a mirror of his body and out ward appearance and spiritually as a reflec tion of his imagination (ingegno) and char acter.9 The image of the man in Truth's mirror might be that of Bellini himself, fixed forever as he gazes into his own fic tion, his own imagination, and there know ing himself. NOTES 1. Both of these paintings are discussed by Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 226-237 and 252-257. 2. For proposed reconstructions of the restello in which Bellini's painting originally appeared, see Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, Zauber des Spiegels: Geschichte und Bedeutung des Spiegels in der Kunst (Munich: 1951), p. 47 and fig. 53; and Edgar Wind, Bellini's Feast of the Gods: A Study in Venetian Humanism (Cambridge, Mass.: 1948), p. 48 n. 14 and p. 52. 3. For a discussion of mirrors and restelli, see Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior, 1400-1600 (London: 1991), pp. 234-241. 4. Giles Robertson, Vincenzo Catena (Edinburgh: 1954), p. 8: "el mio restelo di nogera con zerte fegurete dentro depinte de mano de miser Zuan Bellino." 5. See Goffen, p. 226, for some reservations about the association of the four panels with Catena's restel lo. Goffen (pp. 322-323) believes that restelli were normally made for women. 6. I have followed the identifications argued by Goffen, pp. 235-237. 7. For illustrations of the prints mentioned, see Jay A. Levinson, Konrad Oberhuber, and Jacquelyn Shee han, Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.: 1973), p. 130, no. 48 (Master of the E-series Tarocchi) and p. 370, no. 142 (Jacopo de' Barbari). 8. Cf. Goffen (pp. 231-234): "Self-Knowledge shows the viewer to himself even as he considers his actual reflection in the mirror of the restello" and "Bellini's painted reflection explicitly refers to the viewer, presented by the only figure of the cycle who addresses the beholder directly. What Self-Know ledge shows us is not herself but ourselves, or the self of the original beholder or representative viewer." 9. For ideas about self-portrayal in the Renais sance, see Andre Chastel, Art et humanisme a Flo rence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique (Paris: 1961), pp. 102-103; Martin Kemp, '"Ogni dipintori dipinge se': A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo's Art Theory," in Cultural Aspects of the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Cecil Clough (Manchester: 1976), pp. 311-323; and Norman E. Land, "Giotto as an Ugly Genius: A Study in Self-Portrayal," Explorations in Renaissance Culture 23 (1997):23-36. This content downloaded from 92.63.101.146 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:13:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Article Contents p. [11] p. [12] p. [13] p. [14] p. [15] p. 16 p. 17 p. 18 Issue Table of Contents Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Spring 1999), pp. 1-35 Front Matter REVERSIBILITY, FACT OR FICTION?: THE DANGERS OF ART RESTORATION [pp. 1-8] BACK TO 1410: THE BEGINNINGS OF EYCKIAN ART? [pp. 9-10] THE FICTION OF BELLINI'S "TRUTH" [pp. 11-18] TWO-WAY TRAFFIC: MICHELANGELO AND NORTHERN EUROPEAN ART [pp. 19-26] "THE GREAT SLINGER WAS HIMSELF SLUNG": THE TRANSFER OF THE "DAVID" TO THE ACADEMY IN 1873 [pp. 27-33] BERNINI AND THE HEAVENLY JERUSALEM [pp. 34-35] Back Matter