Chapter 13

(T. Ba.)

BELLINGHAM, SIR EDWARD(d. 1549), lord deputy of Ireland, was a son of Edward Bellingham of Erringham, Sussex, his mother being a member of the Shelley family. As a soldier he fought in France and elsewhere, then became an English member of parliament and a member of the privy council, and in 1547 took part in some military operations in Ireland. In May 1548 he was sent to that country as lord deputy. Ireland was then in a very disturbed condition, but the new governor crushed a rebellion of the Oâ€™Connors in Leinster, freed the Pale from rebels, built forts, and made the English power respected in MÃ¼nster and Connaught. Bellingham, however, was a headstrong man and was constantly quarrelling with his council; but one of his opponents admitted that he was â€œthe best man ofwar that ever he had seen in Ireland.â€ His short but successful term of office was ended by his recall in 1549.

See R. Bagwell,Ireland Under the Tudors, vol. i. (1885).

BELLINGHAM,a city of Whatcom county, Washington, U.S.A., on the E. side of Bellingham Bay, 96 m. N. of Seattle. Pop. (1900) 11,062; (1905, state est.) 26,000; (1910, U.S. census) 24,298. Area about 23 sq. m. It is served by the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, the Canadian Pacific, and the Bellingham Bay & British Columbia railwaysâ€”being a terminus of the last named, which operates only 62 m. of line and connects with the Mt. Baker goldfields and the Nooksack valley farm and orchard region. A suburban electric line was projected in 1907. About 2Â½ m. south-east of the city is the main body of Lake Whatcom, 13 m. long, 1Â¼ m. wide, and 318 ft. higher than the city and the source of its water-supply, a gravity system which cost $1,000,000, being owned by the city. Bellingham has two Carnegie libraries. Among the principal buildings are the county court-house, the city hall, the Young Menâ€™s Christian Association building, and Beckâ€™s theatre, with a seating capacity of 2200. The largest of the stateâ€™s normal colleges is situated here; in 1907 it had a faculty of 25 and 350 students; there are two high schools, two business colleges, and one industrial school also in the city. The excellent harbour, and the fact that Bellingham is nearer to the great markets of Alaska than any other city in the states, make the port an important shipping centre. In the value of manufactured product the city was fourth in the state in 1905 (being passed only by Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane), with a value of $3,293,988; according to a census taken by the local chamber of commerce the value of the product in 1906 was $7,751,464. The principal industrial establishments are shingle (especially cedar) and saw-mills, salmon canneries and factories for the manufacture of tin cans, and machinery used in the canning of salmon. Motive and electric lighting power is brought 52 m. from the falls of the north fork of the Nooksack river, where there is a power plant which furnishes 3500 horsepower. There are deposits of clay and limestone in the surrounding country, and cement is manufactured in the vicinity of the city. The blue-grey Chuckanut sandstone is quarried on the shore of Chuckanut Bay, south of Bellingham; and a coarse, dark-brown sandstone is quarried on Sucia Island, west of the city. There are quarries also on Waldron Island. Bellingham was formed in 1903 by the consolidation of the cities of New Whatcom (pop. in 1900, 6834) and Fairhaven (pop. in 1900, 4228), and was chartered as a city of the first class in 1904; it is named from Bellingham Bay, which Vancouver is supposed to have named, in 1792, in honour of Sir Henry Bellingham.

BELLINI,the name of a family of craftsmen in Venice, three members of which fill a great place in the history of the Venetian school of painting in the 15th century and the first years of the 16th.

I.Jacopo Bellini(c.1400-1470-71) was the son of a tinsmith or pewterer, Nicoletto Bellini, by his wife Franceschina. When the accomplished Umbrian master Gentile da Fabriano came to practise at Venice, where art was backward, several young men of the city took service under him as pupils. Among these were Giovanni and Antonio of Murano and Jacopo Bellini. Gentile da Fabriano left Venice for Florence in 1422, and the two brothers of Murano stayed at home and presently founded a school of their own (seeVivarini). But Jacopo Bellini followed his teacher to Florence, where the vast progress lately made, alike in truth to natural fact and in sense of classic grace and style, by masters like Donatello and Ghiberti, Masaccio and Paolo Uccello, offered him better instruction than he could obtain even from his Umbrian teacher. But his position as assistant to Gentile brought him into trouble. As a stranger coming to practise in Florence, Gentile was jealously looked on. One day some young Florentines threw stones into his shop, and the Venetian pupil ran out and drove them off with his fists. Thinking this might be turned against him, he went and took service on board the galleys of the Florentine state; but returning after a year, found he had in his absence been condemned and fined for assault. He was arrested and imprisoned, but the matter was soon compromised, Jacopo submitting to a public act of penance and his adversary renouncing further proceedings. Whether Jacopo accompanied his master to Rome in 1426 we cannot tell; but by 1429 we find him settled at Venice and married to a wife from Pesaro named Anna (family name uncertain), who in that year made a will in favour of her first child then expected. She survived, however, and bore her husband two sons, Gentile and Giovanni (though some evidences have been thought to point rather to Giovanni having been his son by another mother), and a daughter Nicolosia. In 1436 Jacopo was at Verona, painting a Crucifixion in fresco for the chapel of S. Nicholas in the cathedral (destroyed by order of the archbishop in 1750, but the composition, a vast one of many figures, has been preserved in an old engraving). Documents ranging from 1437 to 1465 show him to have been a member of the Scuola or mutual aid society of St John the Evangelist at Venice, for which he painted at an uncertain date a series of eighteen subjects of the Life of the Virgin, fully described by Ridolfi but now destroyed or dispersed. In 1439 we find him buying a panel of tarsia work at the sale of the effects of the deceased painter Jacobello del Fiore, and in 1440 entering into a business partnership with another painter of the city called Donato. About this time he must have paid a visit to the court of Ferrara, where there prevailed a spirit of free culture and humanism most congenial to his tastes. Pisanello, the first great naturalist artist of north Italy, whose influence on Jacopo at the outset of his career had been only second to that of Gentile da Fabriano, had been some time engaged on a portrait of Leonello dâ€™Este, the elder son of the reigning marquis Niccolo III. Jacopo (according to an almost contemporary sonneteer) competed with a rival portrait, which was declared by the father to be the better of the two. In the next year, the last of the marquis Niccoloâ€™s life, we find him making the successful painter a present of two bushels of wheat. The relations thus begun with the house of Este seem to have been kept up, and among Jacopoâ€™s extant drawings are several that seem to belong to the scheme of a monument erected to the memory of the marquis Niccolo ten years later. He was also esteemed and employed by Sigismondo Malatesta at the court of Rimini. In 1443 Jacopo took as an articled pupil a nephew whom he had brought up from charity; in 1452 he painted a banner for the Scuola of St Mary of Charity at Venice, and the next year received a grant from the confraternity for the marriage of his daughter Nicolosia with Andrea Mantegna, a marriage which had the effect of transferring the gifted young Paduan master definitively from the following of Squarcione to that of Bellini. In 1456 he painted a figure of Lorenzo Giustiniani, first patriarch of Venice, for his monument in San Pietro de Castello, and in 1457, with a son for salaried assistant, three figures of saints in the great hall of the patriarch. For some time about these years Jacopo and his family would seem to have resided at, or at least to have paid frequent visits to Padua, where he is reported to have carried out works now lost, including an altar-piece painted with the assistance of his sons in 1459-1460 for the Gattamelata chapel in the Santo, and several portraits which are described by 16th-century witnesses but have disappeared. At Venice he painted a Calvary for the Scuola of St Mark (1466). His activity can be traced in documents down to August 1470, but in November 1471 his wife Anna describes herself as his relict, so that he must have died some time in the interval.

The above are all the facts concerning the life of Jacopo Bellini which can be gathered from printed and documentary records. The materials which have reached posterity for a critical judgment on his work consist of four or five pictures only, together with two important and invaluable books of drawings. These prove him to have been a worthy third, following the Umbrian Gentile da Fabriano and the Veronese Pisanello, in that trio of remarkable artists who in the first half of the 15th century carried towards maturity the art of painting in Venice and the neighbouring cities. Of his pictures, an important signed example is a life-size Christ Crucified in the archbishopâ€™spalace at Verona. The rest are almost all Madonnas: two signed, one in the Tadini gallery at Lovere, another in the Venice academy; a third, unsigned and long ascribed in error to Gentile da Fabriano, in the Louvre, with the portrait of Sigismondo Malatesta as donor; a fourth, richest of all in colour and ornamental detail, recently acquired from private hands for the Uffizi at Florence. Plausibly, though less certainly, ascribed to him are a fifth Madonna at Bergamo, a warrior-saint on horseback (San Crisogono) in the church of San Trovaso at Venice, a Crucifixion in the Museo Correr, and an Adoration of the Magi in private possession at Ferrara. Against this scanty tale of paintings we have to set an abundance of drawings and studies preserved in two precious albums in the British Museum and the Louvre. The former, which is the earlier in date, belonged to the painterâ€™s elder son Gentile and was by him bequeathed to his brother Giovanni. It consists of ninety-nine paper pages, all drawn on both back and front with a lead point, an instrument unusual at this date. Two or three of the drawings have been worked over in pen; of the remainder many have become dim from time and rubbing. The album at the Louvre, discovered in 1883 in the loft of a country-house in Guienne, is equally rich and better preserved, the drawings being all highly finished in pen, probably over effaced preliminary sketches in chalk or lead. The range of subjects is much the same in both collections, and in both extremely varied, proving Jacopo to have been a craftsman of many-sided curiosity and invention. He passes indiscriminately from such usual Scripture scenes as the Adoration of the Magi, the Agony in the Garden, and the Crucifixion, to designs from classic fable, copies from ancient bas-reliefs, stories of the saints, especially St Christopher and St George, the latter many times repeated (he was the patron saint of the house of Este), fanciful allegories of which the meaning has now become obscure, scenes of daily life, studies for monuments, and studies of animals, especially of eagles (the emblem of the house of Este), horses and lions. He loves to marshal his figures in vast open spaces, whether of architecture or mountainous landscape. In designing such spaces and in peopling them with figures of relatively small scale, we see him eagerly and continually putting to the test the principles of the new science of perspective. His castellated and pinnacled architecture, in a mixed medieval and classical spirit, is elaborately thought out, and scarcely less so his groups and ranges of barren hills, broken in clefts or ascending in spiral terraces. With a predilection for tall and slender proportions, he draws the human figure with a flowing generalized grace and no small freedom of movement; but he does not approach either in mastery of line or in vehemence of action a Florentine draughtsman such as Antonio Pollaiuolo. Jacopoâ€™s influence on the development of Venetian art was very great, not only directly through his two sons and his son-in-law Mantegna, but through other and independent contemporary workshops of the city, in none of which did it remain unfelt.

II.Gentile Bellini(1429-1430-1507), the elder son of Jacopo, first appears independently as the painter of a Madonna, much in his fatherâ€™s manner, dated 1460, and now in the Berlin museum. We have seen how in the previous year he and his brother assisted their father in the execution of an altar-piece for the Santo at Padua. In July 1466 we find him contracting with the officers of the Scuola of St Mark as an independent artist to decorate the doors of their organ. These paintings still exist in a blackened condition. They represent four saints, colossal in size, and designed with much of the harsh and searching austerity which characterized the Paduan school under Squarcione. In December of the same year Gentile bound himself to execute for the great hall of the same company two subjects of the Exodus, to be done better than, or at least as well as, his fatherâ€™s work in the same place. These paintings have perished. For the next eight years the history of Gentileâ€™s life and work remains obscure. But he must have risen steadily in the esteem of his fellow-citizens, since in 1474 we find him commissioned by the senate to restore, renew, and when necessary replace, the series of paintings, the work of an earlier generation of artists, which were perishing from damp on the walls of the Hall of the Great Council in the ducal palace. This was evidently intended to be a permanent employment, and in payment the painter was to receive the reversion of a brokerâ€™s stall in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi; a lucrative form of sinecure frequently allotted to artists engaged for tasks of long duration. In continuation of this work Gentile undertook a series of independent paintings on subjects of Venetian history for the same hall, but had apparently only finished one, representing the delivery of the consecrated candle by the pope to the doge, when his labours were interrupted by a mission to the East. The sultan Mahommed II. had despatched a friendly embassy to Venice, inviting the doge to visit him at Constantinople and at the same time requesting the despatch of an excellent painter to work at his court. The former part of the sultanâ€™s proposal the senate declined, with the latter they complied; and Gentile Bellini with two assistants was selected for the mission, his brother Giovanni being at the same time appointed to fill his place on the works for the Hall of the Great Council. Gentile gave great satisfaction to the sultan, and returned after about a year with a knighthood, some fine clothes, a gold chain and a pension. The surviving fruits of his labours at Constantinople consist of a large painting representing the reception of an ambassador in that city, now in the Louvre; a highly finished portrait of the sultan himself, now one of the treasures, despite its damaged condition, of the collection of the late Sir Henry Layard; an exquisitely wrought small portrait in water-colour of a scribe, found in 1905 by a private collector in the bazaar at Constantinople and now in the collection of Mrs Gardner at Boston; and two pen-and-ink drawings of Turkish types, now in the British Museum. Early copies of two or three other similar drawings are preserved in the StÃ¤del Institute at Frankfurt; such copies may have been made for the use of Gentileâ€™s Umbrian contemporary, Pinturicchio, who introduced figures borrowed from them into some of his decorative frescoes in the Appartamento Borgia at Rome.

A place had been left open for Gentile to continue working beside his brother Giovanni (with whom he lived always on terms of the closest amity) in the ducal palace; and soon after 1480 he began to carry out his share in the great series of frescoes, unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1577, illustrating the part played by Venice in the struggles between the papacy and the emperor Barbarossa. These works were executed not on the wall itself but on canvas (the climate of Venice having so many times proved fatal to wall paintings), and probably in oil, a method which all the artists of Venice, following the example set by Antonello da Messina, had by this time learnt or were learning to practise. The subjects allotted to Gentile, in addition to the above-mentioned presentation of the consecrated candle, were as follows: the departure of the Venetian ambassadors to the court of Barbarossa, Barbarossa receiving the ambassadors, the pope inciting the doge and senate to war, the pope bestowing a sword and his blessing on the doge and his army (a drawing in the British Museum purports to be the artistâ€™s original sketch for this composition), and according to some authorities also the gift of the symbolic ring by the pope to the victorious doge on his return. These works received the highest praise both from contemporary and from later Venetian critics, but no fragment of them survived the fire of 1577. Their character can to some extent be judged by a certain number of kindred historical and processional works by the same hand which have been preserved. Of such the Academy at Venice has three which were painted between 1490 and 1500 for the Scuola of St John the Evangelist, and represent certain events connected with a famous relic belonging to the Scuola, namely, a supposed fragment of the true cross. All have been, much injured and re-painted; nevertheless one at least, showing the procession of the relic through St Markâ€™s Place and the thanksgiving of a father who owed to it the miraculous cure of his son, still gives a good idea of the painterâ€™s powers and style. Great accuracy and firmness of individual portraiture, a strong gift, derived no doubt from his fatherâ€™s example, for grouping and marshalling a crowd of personages in spaces of fine architectural perspective, theseverity and dryness of the Paduan manner much mitigated by the dawning splendour of true Venetian colourâ€”these are the qualities that no injury has been able to deface. They are again manifest in an interesting Adoration of the Magi in the Layard collection; and reappear still more forcibly in the last work undertaken by the artist, the great picture now at the Brera in Milan of St Mark preaching at Alexandria; this was commissioned by the Scuola of St Mark in March 1505, and left by the artist in his will, dated 18th of February 1507, to be finished by his brother Giovanni. Of single portraits by this artist, who was almost as famous for them as for processional groups, there survive one of a doge at the Museo Correr in Venice, one of Catarina Cornaro at Budapest, one of a mathematician at the National Gallery, another of a monk in the same gallery, signed wrongly to all appearance with the name of Giovanni Bellini, besides one or two others in private hands. The features of Gentile himself are known from a portrait medallion by Camelio, and can be recognized in two extant drawings, one at Berlin supposed to be by the painterâ€™s own hand, and another, much larger and more finished, at Christ Church, Oxford, which is variously attributed to Bonsignori and A. Vivarini.

III.Giovanni Bellini(1430-1431-1516) is generally assumed to have been the second son of Jacopo by his wife Anna; though the fact that she does not mention him in her will with her other sons has thrown some slight doubt upon the matter. At any rate he was brought up in his fatherâ€™s house, and always lived and worked in the closest fraternal relation with Gentile. Up till the age of nearly thirty we find documentary evidence of the two sons having served as their fatherâ€™s assistants in works both at Venice and Padua. In Giovanniâ€™s earliest independent works we find him more strongly influenced by the harsh and searching manner of the Paduan school, and especially of his own brother-in-law Mantegna, than by the more graceful and facile style of Jacopo. This influence seems to have lasted at full strength until after the departure of his brother-in-law Mantegna for the court of Mantua in 1460. The earliest of Giovanniâ€™s independent works no doubt date from before this period. Three of these exist at the Correr museum in Venice: a Crucifixion, a Transfiguration, and a Dead Christ supported by Angels. Two Madonnas of the same or even earlier date are in private collections in America, a third in that of Signor Frizzoni at Milan; while two beautiful works in the National Gallery of London seem to bring the period to a close. One of these is of a rare subject, the Blood of the Redeemer; the other is the fine picture of Christâ€™s Agony in the Garden, formerly in the Northbrook collection. The last-named piece was evidently executed in friendly rivalry with Mantegna, whose version of the subject hangs near by; the main idea of the composition in both cases being taken from a drawing by Jacopo Bellini in the British Museum sketch-book. In all these pictures Giovanni combines with the Paduan severity of drawing and complex rigidity of drapery a depth of religious feeling and human pathos which is his own. They are all executed in the old tempera method; and in the last named the tragedy of the scene is softened by a new and beautiful effect of romantic sunrise colour. In a somewhat changed and more personal manner, with less harshness of contour and a broader treatment of forms and draperies, but not less force of religious feeling, are the two pictures of the Dead Christ supported by Angels, in these days one of the masterâ€™s most frequent themes, at Rimini and at Berlin. Chronologically to be placed with these are two Madonnas, one at the church of the Madonna del Orto at Venice and one in the Lochis collection at Bergamo; devout intensity of feeling and rich solemnity of colour being in the case of all these early Madonnas combined with a singularly direct rendering of the natural movements and attitudes of children.

The above-named works, all still executed in tempera, are no doubt earlier than the date of Giovanniâ€™s first appointment to work along with his brother and other artists in the Scuola di San Marco, where among other subjects he was commissioned in 1470 to paint a Deluge with Noahâ€™s Ark. None of the masterâ€™s works of this kind, whether painted for the various schools or confraternities or for the ducal palace, have survived. To the decade following 1470 must probably be assigned a Transfiguration now in the Naples museum, repeating with greatly ripened powers and in a much serener spirit the subject of his early effort at Venice; and also the great altar-piece of the Coronation of the Virgin at Pesaro, which would seem to be his earliest effort in a form of art previously almost monopolized in Venice by the rival school of the Vivarini. Probably not much later was the still more famous altar-piece painted in tempera for a chapel in the church of S. Giovanni e Paolo, where it perished along with Titianâ€™s Peter Martyr and Tintorettoâ€™s Crucifixion in the disastrous fire of 1867. After 1479-1480 very much of Giovanniâ€™s time and energy must have been taken up by his duties as conservator of the paintings in the great hall of the ducal palace, in payment for which he was awarded, first the reversion of a brokerâ€™s place in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and afterwards, as a substitute, a fixed annual pension of eighty ducats. Besides repairing and renewing the works of his predecessors he was commissioned to paint a number of new subjects, six or seven in all, in further illustration of the part played by Venice in the wars of Barbarossa and the pope. These works, executed with much interruption and delay, were the object of universal admiration while they lasted, but not a trace of them survived the fire of 1577; neither have any other examples of his historical and processional compositions come down, enabling us to compare his manner in such subjects with that of his brother Gentile. Of the other, the religious class of his work, including both altar-pieces with many figures and simple Madonnas, a considerable number have fortunately been preserved. They show him gradually throwing off the last restraints of the 15th-century manner; gradually acquiring a complete mastery of the new oil medium introduced in Venice by Antonello da Messina about 1473, and mastering with its help all, or nearly all, the secrets of the perfect fusion of colours and atmospheric gradation of tones. The old intensity of pathetic and devout feeling gradually fades away and gives place to a noble, if more worldly, serenity and charm. The enthroned Virgin and Child become tranquil and commanding in their sweetness; the personages of the attendant saints gain in power, presence and individuality; enchanting groups of singing and viol-playing angels symbolize and complete the harmony of the scene. The full splendour of Venetian colour invests alike the figures, their architectural framework, the landscape and the sky. The altar-piece of the Frari at Venice, the altar-piece of San Giobbe, now at the academy, the Virgin between SS. Paul and George, also at the academy, and the altar-piece with the kneeling doge Barbarigo at Murano, are among the most conspicuous examples. Simple Madonnas of the same period (about 1485-1490) are in the Venice academy, in the National Gallery, at Turin and at Bergamo. An interval of some years, no doubt chiefly occupied with work in the Hall of the Great Council, seems to separate the last-named altar-pieces from that of the church of San Zaccaria at Venice, which is perhaps the most beautiful and imposing of all, and is dated 1505, the year following that of Giorgioneâ€™s Madonna at Castelfranco. Another great altar-piece with saints, that of the church of San Francesco de la Vigna at Venice, belongs to 1507; that of La Corona at Vicenza, a Baptism of Christ in a landscape, to 1510; to 1513 that of San Giovanni Crisostomo at Venice, where the aged saint Jerome, seated on a hill, is raised high against a resplendent sunset background, with SS. Christopher and Augustine standing facing each other below him, in front. Of Giovanniâ€™s activity in the interval between the altar-pieces of San Giobbe and of Murano and that of San Zaccaria, there are a few minor evidences left, though the great mass of its results perished with the fire of the ducal palace in 1577. The examples that remain consist of one very interesting and beautiful allegorical picture in the Uffizi at Florence, the subject of which had remained a riddle until it was recently identified as an illustration of a French medieval allegory, thePÃ¨lerinage de lâ€™Ã¢meby Guillaume de Guilleville; with a set of five other allegories or moral emblems, on a smaller scale and very romantically treated, in the academy at Venice. To these should probably be added, as paintedtowards the year 1505, the portrait of the doge Loredano in the National Gallery, the only portrait by the master which has been preserved, and in its own manner one of the most masterly in the whole range of painting.

The last ten or twelve years of the masterâ€™s life saw him besieged with more commissions than he could well complete. Already in the years 1501-1504 the marchioness Isabella Gonzaga of Mantua had had great difficulty in obtaining delivery from him of a picture of the â€œMadonna and Saintsâ€ (now lost) for which part payment had been made in advance. In 1505 she endeavoured through Cardinal Bembo to obtain from him another picture, this time of a secular or mythological character. What the subject of this piece was, or whether it was actually delivered, we do not know. Albrecht DÃ¼rer, visiting Venice for a second time in 1506, reports of Giovanni Bellini as still the best painter in the city, and as full of all courtesy and generosity towards foreign brethren of the brush. In 1507 Gentile Bellini died, and Giovanni completed the picture of the â€œPreaching of St Markâ€ which he had left unfinished; a task on the fulfilment of which the bequest by the elder brother to the younger of their fatherâ€™s sketch-book had been made conditional. In 1513 Giovanniâ€™s position as sole master (since the death of his brother and of Alvise Vivarini) in charge of the paintings in the Hall of the Great Council was threatened by an application on the part of his own former pupil, Titian, for a joint-share in the same undertaking, to be paid for on the same terms. Titianâ€™s application was first granted, then after a year rescinded, and then after another year or two granted again; and the aged master must no doubt have undergone some annoyance from his sometime pupilâ€™s proceedings. In 1514 Giovanni undertook to paint a Bacchanal for the duke Alfonso of Ferrara, but died in 1516; leaving it to be finished by his pupils; this picture is now at Alnwick.

Both in the artistic and in the worldly sense, the career of Giovanni Bellini was upon the whole the most serenely and unbrokenly prosperous, from youth to extreme old age, which fell to the lot of any artist of the early Renaissance. He lived to see his own school far outshine that of his rivals, the Vivarini of Murano; he embodied, with ever growing and maturing power, all the devotional gravity and much also of the worldly splendour of the Venice of his time; and he saw his influence propagated by a host of pupils, two of whom at least, Giorgione and Titian, surpassed their master. Giorgione he outlived by five years; Titian, as we have seen, challenged an equal place beside his teacher. Among the best known of his other pupils were, in his earlier time, Andrea Previtali, Cima da Conegliano, Marco Basaiti, Niccolo Rondinelli, Piermaria Pennacchi, Martino da Udine, Girolamo Mocetto; in later time, Pierfrancesco Bissolo, Vincenzo Catena, Lorenzo Lotto and Sebastian del Piombo.

Bibliography.â€”Vasari, ed. Milanesi, vol. iii.; Ridolfi,Le Maraviglie, &c., vol. i.; Francesco Sansovino,Venezia Descritta; Morelli,Notizia, &c., di un Assonimo; Zanetti,Pittura Veneziana; F. Aghietti,Elagio Storico di Jacopo e Giovanni Bellini; G. Bernasconi,Cenni intorna la vita e le opere di Jacopo Bellini; Moschini,Giovanni Bellini e pittori contemporanei; E. Galichon inGazette des beaux-arts(1866); Crowe and Cavalcaselle,History of Painting in North Italy, vol. i.; Hubert Janitschek, â€œGiovanni Belliniâ€ in Dohmeâ€™sKunst und KÃ¼nstler; Julius Meyer in Meyerâ€™sAllgemeines KÃ¼nstler-Lexikon, vol. iii. (1885); Pompeo Molmenti, â€œI pittori Belliniâ€ inStudi e ricerche di Storia dâ€™ Arte; P. Paoletti,Raccolta di documenti inediti, fasc. i.; Vasari,Vite di Gentile da Fabriano e Vittor Pisanello, ed. Venturi; Corrado Ricci inRassegna dâ€™ Arte(1901, 1903), andRivista dâ€™ Arte(1906); Roger Fry,Giovanni Belliniin â€œThe Artistâ€™s Libraryâ€; Everard Meynell,Giovanni Belliniin Newnesâ€™s â€œArt Libraryâ€ (useful for a nearly complete set of reproductions of the known paintings); Corrado Ricci,Jacopo Bellini e i suoi Libri di Disegni; Victor Goloubeff,Les Dessins de Jacopo Bellini(the two works last cited reproduce in full, that of M. Goloubeff by far the most skilfully, the contents of both the Paris and the London sketch-books).

(S. C.)

BELLINI, LORENZO(1643-1704), Italian physician and anatomist, was born at Florence on the 3rd of September 1643. At the age of twenty, when he had already begun his researches on the structure of the kidneys and had described the ducts known by his name (Exercitatio anatomica de structura et usu renum, 1662), he was chosen professor of theoretical medicine at Pisa, but soon after was transferred to the chair of anatomy. After spending thirty years at Pisa, he was invited to Florence and appointed physician to the grand duke Cosimo III., and was also made senior consulting physician to Pope Clement XI. He died at Florence on the 8th of January 1704. His works were published in a collected form at Venice in 1708.

BELLINI, VINCENZO(1801-1835), operatic composer of the Italian school, was born at Catania in Sicily, on the 1st of November 1801. He was descended from a family of musicians, both his father and grandfather having been composers of some reputation. After having received his preparatory musical education at home, he entered the conservatoire of Naples, where he studied singing and composition under Tritto and Zingarelli. He soon began to write pieces for various instruments, as well as a cantata and several masses and other sacred compositions. His first opera,Adelson e Savina, was performed in 1825 at a small theatre in Naples; his second dramatic work,Bianca e Fernando, was produced next year at the San Carlo theatre of the same city, and made his name known in Italy. His next work,Il Pirata(1827), was written for the Scala in Milan, to words by Felice Romano, with whom Bellini formed a union of friendship to be severed only by his death. The splendid rendering of the music by Tamburini, Rubini and other great Italian singers contributed greatly to the success of the work, which at once established the European reputation of its composer. In almost every year of the short remainder of his life he produced a new operatic work, which was received with rapture by the audiences of France, Italy, Germany and England. The names and dates of four of Belliniâ€™s operas familiar to most lovers of Italian music are:I Montecchi e Capuleti(1830), in which the part of Romeo became a favourite with all the great contraltos;La Sonnambula(1831);Norma, Belliniâ€™s best and most popular creation (1831); andI Puritani(1835), written for the Italian opera in Paris, and to some extent under the influence of French music. In 1833 Bellini had left his country to accompany to England the singer Pasta, who had created the part of hisSonnambula. In 1834 he accepted an invitation to write an opera for the national grand opera in Paris. While he was carefully studying the French language and the cadence of French verse for the purpose, he was seized with a sudden illness and died at his villa in Puteaux near Paris on the 24th of September 1835. His operatic creations are throughout replete with a spirit of gentle melancholy, frequently monotonous and almost always undramatic, but at the same time irresistibly sweet. To this spirit, combined with a rich flow ofcantilena, Belliniâ€™s operas owe their popularity. â€œI shall never forget,â€ wrote Wagner, â€œthe impression made upon me by an opera of Bellini at a period when I was completely exhausted with the everlastingly abstract complication used in our orchestras, when a simple and noble melody was revealed anew to me.â€

See also G. Labat,Bellini(Bordeaux, 1865); A. Pougin,Bellini, sa vie et ses Å“uvres(Paris, 1868).

BELLINZONA(Ger.Belienz), the political capital of the Swiss canton of Tessin or Ticino. It is 105 m. from Lucerne by the St Gotthard railway, 19 m. from Lugano and 14 m. from Locarno at the head of the Lago Maggiore, these two towns having been till 1881 capitals of the canton jointly with Bellinzona. The old town is built on some hills, on the left bank of the Tessin or Ticino river, and a little below the junction of the main Ticino valley (the Val Leventina) with that of Mesocco. It thus blocked the road from Germany to Italy, while a great wall was built from the town to the river bank. Bellinzona still possesses three picturesque castles (restored in modern times), dating in their present form from the 15th century. They belonged for several centuries to the three Swiss cantons which were masters of the town. The most westerly, Castello Grande or of San Michele, belonged to Uri; the central castle, that of Montebello, was the property of Schwyz; while the most easterly castle, that of Sasso Corbaro, was in the hands of Unterwalden. The 13th-century church of San Biagio (Blaise) has a remarkable 14th-century fresco, while the collegiate church ofSan Stefano dates from the 16th century. In 1900 the population of Bellinzona was 4949, practically all Romanists and Italian-speaking.

Possibly Bellinzona is of Roman origin, but it is first mentioned in 590. It played a considerable part in the early history of Lombardy, being a key to several Alpine passes. In the 8th century it belonged to the bishop of Como, while in the 13th and 14th centuries it was tossed to and fro between the cities of Milan and Como. In 1402 it was taken from Milan by Albert von Sax, lord of the Val Mesocco, who in 1419 sold it to Uri and Obwalden, which, however, lost it to Milan in 1422 after the battle of Arbedo. In 1499 (like the rest of the Milanese) it was occupied by the French, but in 1500 it was taken by Uri. In 1503 the French king ceded it to Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, which henceforth ruled it very harshly through their bailiffs till 1798. At that date it became the capital of the canton Bellinzona of the Helvetic republic, but in 1803 it was united to the newly-formed canton of Tessin.

(W. A. B. C.)

BELLMAN, KARL MIKAEL(1740-1795), Swedish poet, son of a civil servant, was born at Stockholm on the 4th of February 1740. When quite a child he developed an extraordinary gift of improvising verse, during the delirium of a severe illness, weaving wild thoughts together lyrically and singing airs of his own composition. When he was nineteen he became clerk in a bank and afterwards in the customs, but his habits were irregular and he was frequently in great distress, particularly after the death of his patron,GustavusIII. As early as 1757 he publishedEvangeliska DÃ¶dstankar, meditations on the Passion from the German of David von Schweidnitz, and during the next few years wrote, besides other translations, a great quantity of poems, imitative for the most part of Dalin. In 1760 appeared his first characteristic work,MÃ¥nan(The Moon), a satirical poem, which was revised and edited by Dalin. But the great work of his life occupied him from 1765 to 1780, and consists of the collections of dithyrambic odes known asFredmans Epistlar(1790) andFredmans SÃ¥nger(1791). Fredman and his friends were well-known characters in the Stockholm pot-houses, where Bellman had studied them from the life. No poetry can possibly smell less of the lamp than Bellmanâ€™s. He was accustomed, when in the presence of none but confidential friends, to announce that the god was about to visit him. He would shut his eyes, take his zither, and begin apparently to improvise the music and the words of a long Bacchic ode in praise of love or wine. Most of his melodies are taken direct, or with slight adaptations, from old Swedish ballads, and still retain their popularity.Fredmanâ€™s Epistlesbear the clear impress of individual genius; his torrents of rhymes are not without their method; wild as they seem, they all conform to the rules of style, and among those that have been preserved there are few that are not perfect in form. A great Swedish critic has remarked that the voluptuous joviality and the humour of Bellman is, after all, only â€œsorrow clad in rose-colour,â€ and this underlying pathos gives his poems their undying charm. His later works,Bacchi Tempel(The Temple of Bacchus) (1783), eight numbers of a journal calledHvad behagas?(What you Will) (1781), in 1780 a religious anthology entitled in a later edition (1787)Zions Hogtid(Zionâ€™s Holiday), and a translation of Gellertâ€™sFables, are comparatively unimportant. He died on the 11th of February 1795. Much of Bellmanâ€™s work was only printed after his death,Bihang till Fredmans Epistlar(NykÃ¶ping, 1809),Fredmans Handskrifter(Upsala, 1813),Skaldestycken(â€œPoems,â€ Stockholm, 1814) being among the most important of these posthumous works. A colossal bronze bust of the poet by BystrÃ¶m (erected by the Swedish Academy in 1829) adorns the public gardens of Stockholm, and a statue by Alfred NystrÃ¶m is in the Hasselbacken, Stockholm. Bellman had a grand manner, a fine voice and great gifts of mimicry, and was a favourite companion of King Gustavus III.

The best edition of his works was published at Stockholm, edited by J.G. CarlÃ©n, with biographical notes, illustrations and music (5 vols., 1856-1861); see also monographs on Bellman by Nils Erdmann (Stockholm, 1895) and by F. Niedner (Berlin, 1905).

BELLO, ANDRÃ‰S(1781-1865), South American poet and scholar, was born at Caracas (Venezuela) on the 29th of November 1781, and in early youth held a minor post in the civil administration. He joined the colonial revolutionary party, and in 1810 was sent on a political mission to London, where he resided for nineteen years, acting as secretary to the legations of Chile, Colombia and Venezuela, studying in the British Museum, supplementing his small salary by giving private lessons in Spanish, by journalistic work and by copying Jeremy Benthamâ€™s almost indecipherable manuscripts. In 1829 he accepted a post in the Chilean treasury, settled at Santiago and took a prominent part in founding the national university (1843), of which he became rector. He was nominated senator, and died at Santiago de Chile on the 15th of October 1865. Bello was mainly responsible for the civil code promulgated on the 14th of December 1855. His prose works deal with such various subjects as law, philosophy, literary criticism and philology; of these the most important is hisGramÃ¡tica castellana(1847), the leading authority on the subject. But his position in literature proper is secured by hisSilvas Americanas, a poem written during his residence in England, which conveys with extraordinary force the majestic impression of the South American landscape.

Belloâ€™s complete works were issued in fifteen volumes by the Chilean government (Santiago de Chile, 1881-1893); he is the subject of an excellent biography (Santiago de Chile, 1882) by Miguel Luis AmunÃ¡tegui.

(J. F.-K.)

BELLO-HORIZONTE,orMinas, a city of Brazil, capital of the state of Minas Geraes since 1898, about 50 m. N.W. of Ouro Preto, connected with the Central of Brazil railway by a branch line 9 m. in length. Pop. (estimated) in 1906, 25,000 to 30,000. The city was built by the state on an open plateau, and provided with all necessary public buildings, gas, water and tramway services before the seat of government was transferred from Ouro Preto. The cost of transfer was about Â£1,000,000. The city has grown rapidly, and is considered one of the most attractive state capitals of Brazil.

BELLONA(originallyDuellona), in Roman mythology, the goddess of war (bellum,i.e.duellum), corresponding to the Greek Enyo. By later mythologists she is called sometimes the sister, daughter or wife of Mars, sometimes his charioteer or nurse. Her worship appears to have been promoted in Rome chiefly by the family of the Claudii, whose Sabine origin, together with their use of the name of â€œNero,â€ has suggested an identification of Bellona with the Sabine war goddess Nerio, herself identified, like Bellona, with Virtus. Her temple at Rome, dedicated by Appius Claudius Caecus (296B.C.) during a battle with the Samnites and Etruscans (Ovid,Fastivi. 201), stood in the Campus Martius, near the Flaminian Circus, and outside the gates of the city. It was there that the senate met to discuss a generalâ€™s claim to a triumph, and to receive ambassadors from foreign states. In front of it was thecolumna bellica, where the ceremony of declaring war by the fetialis was performed. From this native Italian goddess is to be distinguished the Asiatic Bellona, whose worship was introduced into Rome from Comana, in Cappadocia, apparently by Sulla, to whom she had appeared, urging him to march to Rome and bathe in the blood of his enemies (Plutarch,Sulla, 9). For her a new temple was built, and a college of priests (Bellonarii) instituted to conduct her fanatical rites, the prominent feature of which was to lacerate themselves and sprinkle the blood on the spectators (Tibullus i. 6. 45-50). To make the scene more grim they wore black dresses (Tertullian,De Pallio) from head to foot. The festival of Bellona, which originally took place on the 3rd of June, was altered to the 24th of March, after the confusion of the Roman Bellona with her Asiatic namesake.

See Tiesler,De Bellonae Cultu(1842).

BELLOT, JOSEPH RENÃ‰(1826-1853), French Arctic explorer, was born at Rochefort on the 18th of March 1826, the son of a farrier. With the aid of the authorities of his native town he was enabled at the age of fifteen to enter the naval school, in which he studied two years and earned a high reputation. Hethen took part in the Anglo-French expedition of 1845 to Madagascar, and received the cross of the Legion of Honour for distinguished conduct. He afterwards took part in another Anglo-French expedition, that of Parana, which opened the river La Plata to commerce. In 1851 he joined the Arctic expedition under the command of Captain Kennedy in search of Sir John Franklin, and discovered the strait between Boothia Felix and Somerset Land which bears his name. Early in 1852 he was promoted lieutenant, and in the same year accompanied the Franklin search expedition under Captain Inglefield. As on the previous occasion, his intelligence, devotion to duty and courage won him the esteem and admiration of all with whom he was associated. While making a perilous journey with two comrades for the purpose of communicating with Sir Edward Belcher, he suddenly disappeared in an opening between the broken masses of ice (August 1853). A pension was granted to his family by the emperor Napoleon III., and an obelisk was erected to his memory in front of Greenwich hospital.

BELLOWS, ALBERT F.(1829-1883), American landscape-painter, was born at Milford, Massachusetts, on the 20th of November 1829. He first studied architecture, then turned to painting, and worked in Paris and in the Royal Academy at Antwerp. He painted much in England; was a member of the National Academy of Design, and of the American Water Color Society, New York; and an honorary member of the Royal Belgian Society of Water-Colourists. His earlier work wasgenre, in oils; after 1865 he used water-colours more and more exclusively and painted landscapes. Among his water-colours are â€œAfternoon in Surreyâ€ (1868); â€œSunday in Devonshireâ€ (1876), exhibited at the Philadelphia Exposition; â€œNew England Village Schoolâ€ (1878); and â€œThe Parsonageâ€ (1879). He died in Auburndale, Massachusetts, on the 24th of November 1883.

BELLOWS, HENRY WHITNEY(1814-1882), American clergyman, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 11th of June 1814. He graduated at Harvard College in 1832, and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1837, held a brief pastorate (1837-1838) at Mobile, Alabama, and in 1839 became pastor of the First Congregational (Unitarian) church in New York City (afterwards All Souls church), in charge of which he remained until his death. Here Bellows acquired a high reputation as a pulpit orator and lyceum lecturer, and was a recognized leader in the Unitarian Church in America. For many years after 1846 he editedThe Christian Inquirer, a Unitarian weekly paper, and he was also for some time an editor ofThe Christian Examiner. In 1857 he delivered a series of lectures in the Lowell Institute course, on â€œThe Treatment of Social Diseases.â€ At the outbreak of the Civil War he planned the United States Sanitary Commission, of which he was the first and only president (1861 to 1878). He was the first president of the first Civil Service Reform Association organized in the United States (1877), was an organizer of the Union League Club and of the Century Association in New York City, and planned with his parishioner and friend, Peter Cooper, the establishment of Cooper Union. In 1865 he proposed and organized the national conference of Unitarian and other Christian churches, and from 1865 to 1880 was chairman of its council. He died in New York City on the 30th of January 1882. A bronze memorial tablet by Augustus Saint Gaudens was unveiled in All Souls church in 1886. His published writings includeRestatements of Christian Doctrine in Twenty-Five Sermons(1860);Unconditioned Loyalty(1863), a strong pro-Union sermon, which was widely circulated during the Civil War;The Old World in its New Face: Impressions of Europe in 1867-1868(2 vols., 1868-1869);Historical Sketch of the Union League Club(1879); andTwenty-Four Sermons in All Souls Church, New York, 1865-1881(1886).

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