Two of the latest, and unfortunately among the last, additions to the Cambridge Companions to the History of Art series are devoted to Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Together, the two books trace a trajectory from Bellini’s first documented notice in 1459 to the death of his one-time apprentice and eventual rival, Titian, in 1576. Edited by Peter Humfrey and Patricia Meilman, respectively, The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini and The Cambridge Companion to Titian feature new essays by major scholars in the field. Intended as supplements to the standard monographs, they are of interest to specialists and students alike. They offer a clear perspective on the state of the field, present new research, and point the way for future scholarship, making an important contribution to the study not only of Venetian art, but of Renaissance art in general.

The books share the common goal of presenting an alternative perspective on the dominant narrative of the Renaissance inherited from Giorgio Vasari, which privileges Florence and Rome at the expense of Venice. The introductory essays and subsequent essays not only examine Vasari’s biases and motives, but also emphasize contemporary, pro-Venetian voices, primarily those of Lodovico Dolce and Pietro Aretino, in the lively debate and rivalry that characterized the period. By reminding us how the outlines of Renaissance art were and continue to be shaped by Vasari and his legacy, these books help us understand Bellini and Titian on their own terms and subtly shift our perception of the Venetian Renaissance. For example, Paul Joannides’s brilliant essay in the Titian volume, “Titian and Michelangelo/Michelangelo and Titian,” not only explores the influence of Central Italian art on Titian, but offers a groundbreaking reading of Michelangelo’s indebtedness to Venetian art, suggesting how some of his most provocative secular works—Leda and the Swan, Venus and Cupid, and the gift drawings for Tommaso de’Cavalieri—reflect the influence of Venetian precedents.

The distinct genesis of the two books is revealed in their structure. The essays on Bellini edited by Humfrey derive from a conference held at the University of Saint Andrews, and they retain a sense of scholarly dialogue, with frequent intratextual references. The contributions to Meilman’s volume on Titian, on the other hand, were specially commissioned, and the book is organized more like a textbook. Although each book stands on its own, they work nicely as companion volumes, offering essays that elucidate not only the artist in question, but larger issues of concern for understanding the Venetian milieu. Iain Fenlon’s “Music in Titian’s Venice,” for example, explores the role of music in the “myth of Venice” as a metaphor for the harmony of the state and as a mechanism for animating public processions, religious celebrations, and other ceremonies of Venetian communal experience. Fenlon’s survey of the many ways music functioned in Venetian culture, from formal performances in the elaborately structured and controlled ceremonies of state to unscripted moments such as the impromptu musical celebrations after the victory over the Turks at Lepanto, demonstrates how deeply music was woven into the fabric of Venetian life. It does not bear directly on Titian’s artistic output, but rather amplifies the context in which he lived and worked, and is thus useful for any student of the Venetian Renaissance. Similarly, Jennifer Fletcher’s insightful reading of “Bellini’s Social World” illuminates the particular circumstances of Bellini’s social status, identifying him as a member of the elite cittadini originari, and thereby reveals the uniquely complex social politics of the Venetian state and their impact on artistic practice.

The Bellini book has to struggle against the prevailing view that Titian surpassed his former master to become the predominant painter in Venice, which relegates Bellini to the role of a Quattrocento old-timer unable to keep up with his younger competitors and with the demands of Cinquecento style. In his essay on Titian and Michelangelo, for example, Joannides judges Bellini’s art in Cinquecento terms and finds it wanting: “Its emotion was deep but limited in range; it could not easily handle conflict, or the heroic; it was little attuned to dynamic interaction of character, avoided the erotic, could not seize the evanescent, was hardly able to energise space . . . and was deficient in the virtuosic drawing and figural articulation that create visual and psychological tension” (124). Carolyn Wilson’s contribution to the Bellini volume on “Giovanni Bellini and the ‘Modern Manner’” defends Bellini’s honor. Reviewing the latest scholarship on the artist, Wilson calls for a reevaluation of Bellini’s place in the history of Venetian Renaissance art, identifying him as an innovator whose “astounding stylistic progress” has been misread as “stiff and prudish attempts to keep up with an emerging style” (100). She not only surveys new evidence, but also invokes the “period eye” of such astute observers of the art scene as Isabella d’Este, who longed for a work by Bellini’s hand, and Albrecht Dürer, who, in contrast to Vasari (who favored Giorgione), placed Bellini as the preeminent painter in the Venetian art world of his moment.

The picture of Bellini that emerges is considerably more complex than we have come to expect. We come to see him as an artist of “extraordinary synthetic talents” (122), sensitive to the influence of his peers and to the variety of visual experience available to him, who experimented with technique and responded in his own way to changes in the artistic scene and the demands of his patrons to create profoundly evocative images that engage his viewers’ imaginative response. Including Humfrey’s introduction, the book’s twelve essays present Bellini as an artist deeply embedded within cultural, social, and artistic networks, and use these insights into the broader context to explain the production and reception of specific works. This is a book about Giovanni Bellini and social context (Fletcher), artistic influence (Christiansen, Lucco, Wilson), other media (Pincus, Howard), and artistic practice (Gentili, Hills, Dunkerton, Goldner, Tempestini). The scholarly approaches range from broad social history to detailed investigations of technique; it is impossible to treat them all in detail here, but they are of exceptional quality and interest. It is especially instructive to read the essays by Dunkerton, Goldner, and Tempestini, which demonstrate the “continuing relevance of refined connoisseurship” (12) by exploring studio practice and stylistic development through careful visual and technical analysis.

In addition to presenting new evidence on Bellini’s studio practice and social status, the book is also useful for its treatment of the historiography of the artist by tracing the key issues in Bellini scholarship and his shifting critical fortunes. All the authors are sensitive to the book’s dual audience of specialists and students. As they present the latest readings of Bellini and his art, they also demonstrate how their work has emerged from generations of debate and research, offering a model for students of how to “do” art history.

Although the book offers a richly detailed reading of Venetian Renaissance culture, Bellini himself is never far from view. Several essays trace his development (Humfrey, Christiansen, Lucco, and Wilson), and offer different, sometimes contradictory conclusions on questions of his legitimacy and chronology. Keith Christiansen’s essay on “Bellini and Mantegna” analyzes Bellini’s early artistic development, exploring how he emerged from the influence of his father Jacopo and brother Gentile to grapple with the example of his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, a lifelong fascination that would shape his artistic vision. Mauro Lucco likewise investigates Bellini’s response to Flemish art, suggesting how specific pictures may have migrated to Venice and thus entered Bellini’s orbit. Lucco also speculates on the possible influence of Rogier van der Weyden. Bellini’s sensitivity to both Italian and Northern technique and style is reflected, as George Goldner argues, in his drawings—an aspect of Bellini’s art that until now has received little attention.

In addition to the expected debates and familiar faces such as Mantegna, Giorgione, and Leonardo, several essays bring to bear unexpected or undervalued source material as influence, including manuscript illumination (Christiansen and Howard) and small-scale gems and other antiquities (Pincus). Deborah Howard’s study of “Bellini and Architecture,” for example, not only discusses the expressive dimensions of Bellini’s use of architecture in his paintings and in their physical placement, but also draws interesting parallels between Bellini’s use of architectural space and the fictive “layering of space” of manuscript illumination. Augusto Gentili’s contribution on “Bellini and Landscape” likewise sheds new light on landscape as a tool for shaping a viewer’s understanding of the symbolic meaning of Bellini’s religious works. Gentili simultaneously demonstrates the clarity of Bellini’s metaphoric language and the complexity of the response it provokes.

If the Bellini who emerges from this collection of essays is a protean master whose place in the history of Venetian art and Renaissance art in general has been undervalued, the Titian we confront in Meilman’s collection needs no such reevaluation—his place in the history of art is secure. The respective positions of these artists are reflected in the different aims of the volumes devoted to them. The Bellini book clearly means to supplement the standard monographs by presenting sophisticated case studies and new research to advance Bellini studies. The Titian book, on the other hand, takes a different approach. Shaped under Meilman’s guiding hand, this collection of eleven essays plus an introduction could well serve as a replacement to a standard monograph in a survey class. Meilman’s introduction provides a brief but comprehensive survey of Titian’s career, the major works, and some pressing issues of interpretation. The book also includes a useful annotated biography of the artist and a glossary, clearly organized with an eye to classroom use, although the book is priced for library, not student, budgets.

The book is divided into three sections—Titian’s Diverse Genres, Titian and His Art, and Titian Interpreted—but these subdivisions are flexible, and many of the essays could easily fit under different headings. They include traditional, chronological surveys of Titian’s religious art (Meilman) and his engagement with the print medium (Karpinski), studies of his interactions with artistic and literary circles (Joannides, Land), iconographic and interpretive elaborations of specific works or motifs (Rosand, Wilson, Freedman), and more self-consciously “theoretical” essays that engage with psychoanalysis (Adams) and questions of gender (Garrard).

Many of the essays offer new perspectives on canonical works. David Rosand’s analysis of Bacchus and Ariadne begins with a consideration of the concept of ut pictor poeta and elaborates Titian’s “combinatorial inventiveness” (38) in constructing his mythological dramas from multiple literary and visual sources. Some of these are expected (Ovid, Catullus), but Rosand makes a compelling argument that Titian found the antique visual sources that depicted the sleeping Ariadne inadequate to the psychological and narrative complexity he was seeking. Titian found his solution, whether consciously or not, in Annunciation scenes, in which the female object of divine attention is aware of and responsive to the advent of her supernatural visitor.

Luba Freedman’s essay on “Titian and the Classical Heritage” balances Rosand’s study by inverting the borrowing. Freedman explores the religious subtexts of Titian’s use of classical motifs in his religious art, arguing that the artist’s translation of classical forms into Christian contexts was meant to emphasize Christianity’s reversal of the antique “infatuation with physical pleasures and corporeal beauty” (190). Freedman’s observation that Titian “deliberately provided the observant viewer with indications to the motifs he had borrowed” (185) complements Joannides’s intriguing study of the meaning behind the artist’s pictorial quotations of Michelangelo, Raphael, and the antique.

In her essay, “Invention, Devotion, and the Requirements of Patrons: Titian and the New Cult of St. Joseph,” Carolyn Wilson shows the familiar subject of the Holy Family in a new light. Pointing out that the title “Holy Family” is an anachronism that should be more accurately rendered as “Virgin and Child with Saint Joseph,” Wilson traces the development of Joseph’s cult in Venice and beyond, mapping iconographic shifts in the saint’s representation and relating them to the religious and political concerns that promoted his cult and motivated representations of the saint. The question of iconography and meaning is also of concern for Laurie Schneider Adams. Her essay, “Iconographic Aspects of the Gaze in Some Paintings by Titian,” brings the language and theory of psychoanalysis to bear on a group of paintings in a new way, considering the “gaze” as an internal aspect of the painting—exchanged between figures in the work—rather than as a dynamic of viewer and image.

Deborah Howard’s discussion of “Titian’s Painted Architecture” elaborates the role of architecture both fictive and real in Titian’s art, providing context—from the physical environment of Venice to his friendship with Jacopo Sansovino—for the painter’s understanding of architectural form and meaning. In addition to demonstrating how Titian exploited the actual placement of such works as the Frari Assumption of the Virgin, Howard draws our attention to the unexpected or easily overlooked aspects of architecture in painting, such as distant views of cityscapes and the architectonic pictorial structures Titian constructs.

Mary Garrard’s exemplary essay, “‘Art More Powerful than Nature’?: Titian’s Motto Reconsidered,” concludes the collection. Garrard suggests “Nature is a more powerful art” as an alternative translation of the artist’s motto “Natura potentior Ars,” a reading that more accurately reflects the Venetian understanding of the art/nature relationship as “reciprocal and complementary” rather than competitive. Her study of sixteenth-century art theory is sensitive not only to the contrast between Florentine and Venetian approaches to the art/nature duality, but to the subtle role that gender plays in defining the opposition of Natura and Ars and thus the role of the artist in creation.

Together these volumes give a new and exciting perspective on the field of Renaissance art. Blame cannot attach to the editors or contributors for the only real fault of these books—the decision on the publisher’s part not to include a single color plate. This lack is ironic, given the role of colorito in defining Venetian painting, and is especially frustrating when reading an essay such as Paul Hills’s fascinating “Bellini and Colour.” But the reader compelled to look elsewhere for color reproductions will do so with a new appreciation for the art of these great Venetian masters.