Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo's equal

In The Agony in the Garden, the religious painter attempted a true landscape 20 years before Leonardo's lauded sketch of the Arno river. Does that make him an innovator to rival Da Vinci?
The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr
Giovanni Bellini's The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr (1507) demonstrates the painter's grasp of realistic landscape. Photograph: National Gallery/Corbis

Giovanni Bellini is giving me a headache. He's screwing with my idea of what happened when in the story of art, and what happened where.

Let's begin with his painting The Agony in the Garden, which hangs in London's National Gallery. Not very Christmassy, I know, but the religious narrative is not what interests me. This piece is extraordinary for its landscape: a stunningly real, solid, recognisable north Italian rural space with, as its crowing glory, clustered buildings on a hill, lit by the morning sun against a pink and blue sky.

Look for a moment at those houses and you see they are not laboriously drawn, but touched into existence as blocks of light, planes of colour. Then let your eyes grope their way further among the knotty rocks, concave cliffs and advancing light of this magically natural painting.

Then consider the date. The Agony in the Garden was painted in about 1465. The earliest landscape in European art with a date actually written on it is Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of an Arno vista, done in 1473.

Bellini's intense exploration of earthly space and natural light precedes Leonardo's youthful masterpiece. And in his shaping of a world in depth and substance through his chosen means of pure light Bellini is, dare I say it, Leonardo's … equal?

A judgment on that would have to include another of Bellini's paintings in London's National Gallery: the portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan Bellini painted in 1501-2. With his sublime calm and stillness, the soft colour that creates his facial features and the warm Venetian air that seems to waft inside the picture, Doge Loredan is the male Mona Lisa. Bellini painted him just a year or two before Leonardo began his iconic portrait.

But Bellini was an artist from a different generation. His birth date is not known but he was already at work in 1459. His long life meant he was still at work in the early 16th century – in fact he died just three years before Leonardo, in 1516. More miraculously still, he evolved or convulsed his style to fit in with the new, more poised and classical high Renaissance sensibility of the 1500s. Hence his portrait of Loredan really does look like a male, Venetian answer to the Mona Lisa, and he even branched out near the end of his days into the newly fashionable genre of the nude.

These were daring steps for an artist who worked most of his life in a world where art was primarily religious in purpose, where painters were essentially regarded as brilliant artisans rather than intellectuals and where the technical discoveries of the Renaissance were very much a work in progress. Bellini was an innovator from the start, a mind of huge originality. Unlike his Florentine rivals he was not a writer, a theorist, an autobiographer. He was only a painter – that and nothing less.

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