Room
8
This room opens with seven portraits that
bear witness to the genre that Antonello loved
most of all and explored so expertly. In his
paintings exhibited here (from Rome, Turin,
and Berlin) dating to late in his career, he
takes the typical Flemish model to the utmost
perfection in the sharp but perfectly balanced
way in which he picks out details of
physiognomy and personality. The painting
from Berlin – signed and dated 1478 – is a
profound renewal of the fifteenth-century
portrait prototype, achieved by replacing the
customary neutral background with a broad
landscape, executed well before Bellini’s
experimentations. The works by Alvise Vivarini
and Jacobello di Antonello, Antonello’s son,
evince the importance of Antonello’s teaching,
while the two works by Bellini are quite
different: Portrait of a Blond-haired Young
Man from Rome and the Male Portrait from
Nivaagaard, in which Bellini’s style of
portraiture owes more to Flemish art –
particularly Memling – than to that of
Antonello. Typical of Bellini, the tendency to set the subject against a blue sky gives the
face an expression of serene detachment that
is quite different from Antonello’s ironic
stance. The second section of the room
contains three meditations on the theme of
the dead Christ. The Christ at the Columnfrom the Louvre constitutes the pinnacle of
Antonello’s explorations of this theme. The
bold and highly original iconographic scheme
conveys the sufferings of the martyred Christ
in extreme close-up. Compared to this intense
yet restrained rendering, Bellini gives a highly
dramatic interpretation of the subject, in
which the expressive tension of the scene is
increased by the unusual angle of the
composition, with the Saviour’s legs seemingly
entering the viewer’s pace.
