Giovanni Bellini.

This book is yet another manifestation of Rona Goffen's broad and deep knowledge of Venetian history and of Christian culture and iconography, a knowledge that serves as a background and support for sensitive, often perceptive descriptions and interpretations of Giovanni Bellini's works. Another strength of her book lies in the attention she gives to Bellini's consciousness of the viewer of his paintings. For instance, in his earliest known work, Saint Jerome in the Wildness (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham), Goffen says that "Bellini treats the viewer-worshiper as the unseen witness of Jerome's saintly isolation" (5). In other words, Bellini, aware of the beholder, implicated him in the subject matter and in a sense created the viewer as he painted each picture.

Though the point is only implicit in Goffen's discussion, Bellini knew that many viewers would imaginatively participate in his works. Referring to the weeping figures in his Dead Christ with the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist (Brera, Milan), for instance, the author says that the artist's "image . . . may shed tears, moved by the agonizing grief of Christ's mourners [i.e., those who view the picture]" (72). Here Goffen is truly historical for she sees the picture, perhaps Bellini's most subtle and moving, as Pietro Aretino or Giorgio Vasari might have seen it: imaginatively.

Bellini's paintings invite imaginative participation in another way, namely, through the cartellini that he was so fond of employing as a place to sign his name but also as a means of lending a voice to his figures. In his early Transfiguration of Christ (Museo Civico Correr, Venice), for example, the inscription on the cartellino at the bottom contains a quotation from Job (19:21) that addresses the viewer-worshiper: "Have pity on me, O you my friend" (14). This inscription might signal the presence of a figure of Job (who was especially revered in Venice) that was possibly on one of the side panels originally belonging with the painting. By associating the voice and suffering of Job with Christ, however, the inscription deepens our experience of the painting and its meanings. Moreover, in the Bible the verse continues "for the hand of God hath touched me," possibly suggesting to some viewers that Christ is like Job because both men suffered as the result of God's touch. And in representations of the Transfiguration of Christ, as Goffen reminds us, there is the implied voice of God saying, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." The imaginative Renaissance viewer, like Goffen herself, would have been open to the nuances of significance and meaning that the imaginal voices of Job and God suggest.

Bellini was not a philosopher or theologian; nor was he a scientist in the modern sense, although like most artists of his time, he closely observed the light, colors, and forms of nature. Bellini was a poet and his paintings are poetic. This fact is nowhere clearer than in his landscapes. Unlike twentieth-century artists (and viewers), he had not abandoned nature to live in his head alone. For him nature was alive - not as a godless realm of functioning cells, but as part of a living universe. As Renaissance theologians explained, nature has soul (anima mundi), and Bellini's love of this soul (of Sophia) informs his minute observations of nature and her soulful effects. Goffen brings all of this to our attention in her descriptions of such paintings as the St. Francis in the Frick Collection, New York: "landscape is a second protagonist of Bellini's composition, as expressive of God's presence as the explicitly supernatural rays of light. Not only those golden shafts but the diffuse naturalistic light that illuminates the scene confirms God's presence in every particle of creation" (111). Many have felt the poetry of this painting. Still, at the moment, art history needs more of this kind of imaginative interpretation and more books like this one.

NORMAN E. LAND University of Missouri, Columbia