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Carpaccio continued from page 24

belonged, toward the close of the fifteenth century, to one or the other of these two stylistic camps.  And, as the Mantegna-Bellini direction was now becoming virtually an entire generation old, the advantage of momentum and popularity began to accrue to the latter.  Carpaccio's own teacher (still hypothetical, however, in terms of documents) is said to have been Benedetto Diana, a one time pupil of Giovanni Bellini, who devotedly, if dully, continued the latter's forms well into the sixteenth century.

One further condition, an historical anomaly, complicated the view of art the young Carpaccio had to behold at the outset of his career: the strange thousand-year-old continuance of the partly outmoded yet persistent Byzantine tradition in Venetian art.  The Venetian Republic, of course, had been until the fall of Constantinople only a few decades before literally a member and intellectual fief of the Byzantine Empire.  Still among the Queen of the Adriatic's most august courtiers, those very ancient Venetian patrician families who had over centuries contributed Doges and Senators to that most Byzantinized of governments among European capitals, who never forgot theirs was the sole Continental metropolis to face the East on the latter's very boundaries——to an among this old and powerful society, Byzantium as a way of life somehow could symbolize the eastbound maritime destiny of Venice.  There exist innumerable examples of this retardataire Byzantinism continually being reborn in new structures, sculptures and pictures throughout the fifteenth century in Venetian art.  They were created in a period when, after actually some centuries before, the ogival Gothic had already throughout the city rivaled and often replaced surviving Byzantine structures and their works of art, now in the quattrocento a new wave of the strong, firm and erect members of the Classic orders were typically reforming Venetian building, sculpting and painting.  About 1475, at a time when the familiar Classical façades designed by the Lombardo family [fig. 14] were encroaching, in completion or in plan, upon the face of Venice, that extraordinary and wholly atypical painting of Giovanni Bellini's, the Madonna Greca (Brera, Milan), was already commissioned and completed——an amazing anomaly because in it the artist deliberately submits his own characteristic forms of the human figure, originally rooted in Mantegna's Hellenistically conceived Classicism, to the schematic Byzantine ritual of flattening and linearizing.  He finally produced an image like one of those later icons often made a little farther to the east of Venice, wherein an already unconscious influence of the experienced High Renaissance betrays the Byzantine goal of immutability.

In Giovanni Bellini's Madonna Greca, the surely unconscious Renaissance betrayal comes out of a purer, less fulsome Classicism——out of that earlier fresh burst of rediscovered formal principles sparked here by Donatello and very likely by that majestic life-size standing bronze of his, the Junoesque Madonna on the high altar of Sant'Antonio in Padua.  Still, this incipient or, rather, surviving Classicism of the Madonna Greca is something not at once detected by every lay spectator, and we can safely assume it was not the intent either of the artist or of his patron who had ordered this curiosity.  The original intent could only have been deliberately to sustain and maintain the Byzantine tradition within a city where the preceding three or four centuries with the oncoming of its own waves of modernity had begun to crowd out the old-fashioned Constantinople style so beloved of old families (often if only to establish and maintain their franchise in society).  The condition must have resembled a little those remarkable vehicles one still used to see before the last war on the inner roadways of Central Park, of the Bois de Boulogne and of the Villa Borghese: handsomely built équipages led by teams of at least one finely matched pair, driven by a coachman, with sometimes even a footman, wearing full, formal household uniform, while inside rode the twentieth-century owners——whose fortune of several generations was at the moment probably being enhanced by investments in airplane and munitions shares.  An equivalent paradox is to be found in the affection of Venetians for the belated Byzantine.

Long accepted by scholars (though not documented) as Carpaccio's earliest painting, The Savior with Four Apostles [fig. 3] is assumed, in the current catalogue, to date from about 1480, when its author would have been around sixteen, and age not unusual in its time for the release of a student-painter or apprentice from the studio of his master (Mantegna's first such independent works, his frescoes in the Eremitani, Padua, he commenced at fourteen).  The Venice catalogue construes in this picture its author's indebtedness——presumably in the frontality of the Savior's half-figure behind the parapet——the influence of Antonello de Messina, whose Venetian sojourn in 1475-76 had made a great impact on Venetian painting.  Indeed there is a suggestion of such an influence here, although one wonders whether this tendency toward absolute frontality——which recurs through a good part of Carpaccio's visible career——may not be traced more directly to his own constant surroundings.  The section of the San Marco (Pentecostal Cupola) mosaic reproduced [fig. 4] alongside this painting serves here as only one out of an infinite number of extant examples of the style of the prolific twelfth- and thirteenth-century Venetian mosaicists.  The fact that Carpaccio's art partly but strongly developed out of an extraordinary sense for realistic observation of his surroundings is testified to by other evidence cited below and we can safely assume he could not have been formatively either unaware of or unimpressed by the already venerated mosaics of San Marco.  If indeed the Savior with Four Apostles is from the hand of Carpaccio, and of Carpaccio at sixteen, we can postulate something of his beginnings and the roots of his art from it.  And, in fact, were not the picture by him, it would have to be the work of some other young, still tentative painter, wither directly or indirectly a Bellini pupil, whose eyes were independently open to the art around him, so that our postulations can in some measure apply as well to Carpaccio.  In this icon-like, and therefore imposing rather than impressive, confrontation there are indeed some allusions to the effect of Antonello's visit in Venice.  But remember, also, that almost concurrently with the latter, Giovanni Bellini was completing his wholly Byzantinized Madonna Greca and thus furnishing at least one item of evidence that Venetian eyes were then looking toward the Byzantine art of the mosaics of San Marco, as well as past them to Sta. Sophia, at the same time as they were looking at renascent Hellenism in two directions: first, the Florentine-Donatello-Mantegna-Giovanni Bellini line; and, secondly, the sixth-century Attic archaicism reborn in Antonello's heads in a way that makes one suspect he had seen Greek archaic heads in decaying though grand Sicilian temples like Agrigento.  This picture may well be, then, a document of two kinds of originally Greek forms as, alongside one another, they influenced late fifteenth-century Venetian art, no matter who painted the picture.  If it is not by Carpaccio, it is nevertheless largely such a picture as he might well have painted at sixteen, just emerging form his student years. (Actually the conjectured date of the painting needs to be checked, and with it, of course, the authorship: the two young apostles at the top, at either side of the head of the Savior, are shown wearing their hair alla zazzere, a high fashion among Venetian dandies usually supposed to have dated 1490-1500——as documented by Andrea Riccio's handsome bronze male portrait bust of ca. 1495, showing the same fashion (Correr Museum, Venice).  Whether this tonsorial mode reigned as early as 1480 in sufficient strength to have thus been conferred upon august apostle figures in a painting, is the question whose definite answer will immediately regulate the status of this Savior with Four Apostles).

In any case, Carpaccio's broad spectrum of influences, reaching all the way from Byzantium to that particular Venetian Gothic of palace façades and manuscript illumination, but one of his St. Ursula pictures, can serve as a random example. St. Ursula's Arrival in Rome [fig. 1] seems, according to a chronology based on stylistic development, about the third one executed by Carpaccio of the nine canvases in this cycle, and in it he has already begun to master his disposition of landscape and buildings, in terms of color and space——which is later to become his unique and most characteristic quality; here only the Gothic of his still somewhat awkward full faces and the even less apt profiles, which he is soon to resolve in slightly later works of the same cycle, show him a young man still developing——as is also shown by his rather severe attempt at realistic architecture in depicting the Castel Sant'Angelo and other Roman buildings (probably unseen by Carpaccio and done her after other representations) contrasting with his later characteristic architectural fancies and caprices in the following pictures of the St. Ursula cycle.

This early sense of Carpaccio's for an almost reportorial observation and recording of the physical world about him comes as a strange accompaniment to the rather medieval aspects of his spiritual world that also formed his style——while his topical realism supplied his subject matter or at least the genre themes with which he populated his pictures, religious or secular.  But even in the latter aspects he also partook of that element of the surviving medieval spirit which required of the painter——not yet artist, but still merely maker of records and images——that he possess a special humility before his
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