BELLINI, GENTILE

born c. 1429, Venice -buried Feb. 23, 1507, Venice painter, member of the founding family of the Venetian school of Renaissance painting, best known for his portraiture and his scenes of Venice. Gentile was trained by his father, Jacopo Bellini, a painter who introduced the Renaissance style into Venice. Jacopo's influence may be seen in Gentile's early "Madonna." As an independent artist, he contracted with the officers of the San Marco School in 1466 to decorate the doors of their organ. These paintings represent four saints, colossal in size and designed with the harsh austerity and daring perspective that characterized the style of his brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna, then the most prominent painter of the Paduan school. The same influence may be seen in his "Banner of Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani" (1465), with its sharp, incisive outlines and stiff drapery. In 1479 the doge ("duke") of Venice sent Gentile to Constantinople as a painter to Sultan Mehmed II. The most important of the extant works that Gentile painted there is the "Portrait of Mohammad II" (c. 1480), a masterful characterization of the shrewd, cultivated ruler. In his pen-and-gouache drawing "Portrait of a Turkish Boy" (1479-80), Gentile employs a flat patterned style similar to that of the Turkish miniatures that influenced such later works as his "Portrait of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo" (1478-85). Among Gentile's best-known works are the scenes of Venice painted for the School of San Giovanni Evangelista, a religious fraternal organization. These works deal with episodes related to a relic of the Holy Cross that the school owned. Those events are all but lost in the panorama of "Procession in St. Mark's Square" (1496) and the "Recovery of the Holy Cross" (1500), huge canvases painted with fastidious attention to the smallest detail and crowded with small, rigid figures, including many portraits. A similar but lesser-known work is his "St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria" (1493-1507), which was finished after Gentile's death by his brother, Giovanni, one of the great Venetian painters of the Renaissance. These paintings are of interest today primarily as records of Venetian life and architecture during the 15th century.