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Cardinal Bessarion attended by the two brothers of the Scuola della Carit… in prayer with the Bessarion reliquary: tabernacle door for the Sala dell' Albergo of the Scuola di S. Maria dei Battuti della Carit…, Venice tempera with gold and silver on panel 401/4 x 14 5/8 in. (102.3 x 37.2 cm.) PROVENANCE Painted as the cover of the door for the altar that housed the Bessarion Reliquary in the Sala dell' Albergo of the Scuola di S. Maria dei Battuti della Carit…, Venice, by 1472. The altar remained in situ until after the French Occupation of Venice, 1797, and had been dismantled by 1821 when the reliquary was ceded to The Emperor Francis I of Austria (see below). Erich Lederer. 'Presented to' the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1952, inv. no. 9109. Restituted to the heirs of Erich Lederer, 2001. LITERATURE L. Planiscig, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, 1928. B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1932, p. 68, where dated to c. 1465-70. R. Longhi, Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana, 1946, p. 45, reprinted in Ricerche sulla pittura veneta, Florence, 1978, p. 49, where dated to 1463-5. B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Venetian Schools, London, 1957, I, p. 28, pl. 182. C. Gilbert, 'A Sarasota Note-book, I, The Development of Gentile Bellini's Portraiture', Arte Veneta, 1961, pp. 33 and 37, note 7. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Katalog der Gem„ldegalerie, II, Vienna, 1965, no. 450. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Verzeichnis der Gem„lde, Vienna, 1973, pp. 19-20, pl. 2. Dizionario Enciclopedico Bolaffi dei Pittori e degli Incisori Italiani, Turin, 1972, I, p. 451, where the commission is dated to 1471. F. Heinemann, Giovanni Bellini e i Belliniani, III, Supplemento e Ampliamenti, Hildesheim, Zurich and New York, 1991, p. 115, fig. 206, where dated to 1463-4. R. Polacco, 'La Storia del Reliquario Bessarion e dopo il Rinvenimento del Verso della Croce Scomparso', Saggi e Memorie di storia dell' arte, 18, 1992, p. 88. NOTES The fullest account of the Bessarion Reliquary is that by Polacco ( op. cit., pp. 87-95 and 195-202, figs. 1-8), on which the following account is largely based. CARDINAL BESSARION Venice, with its extensive interests in the Morea and Cyprus, was inevitably drawn into the complex web of diplomatic activity between Constantinople and Rome in the last years of the Byzantine Empire and after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Cardinal John Bessarion played an important part in this. Born in Trebizond in 1389 or 1395, he became a Basilian monk and studied philosophy in the Morea (the Peloponnese), before being appointed Bishop of Nicaea. In 1438 he was sent by the Emperor John VIII Paleologos to the Council of Ferrara, his constructive role in which was recognised by his elevation to the cardinalship by Pope Eugenius IV in the following year. Bessarion, who was celebrated as much for his learning as for his persuasive powers, himself remained in Italy, appointed in turn Archbishop of Siponto and, in 1463, Patriarch of Constantinople, by Popes Nicholas V and Pius II. Bessarion continued to study Greek texts, and although much of his literary activity was directed against orthodox bishops who did not seek to accommodate with Rome, he published a defence of Plato and translated works by Zenophon and Aristotle, among others. He was already well-known in Venice when on 5 July 1463, he was sent there as legate a latere. He gave a celebrated series of Greek manuscripts first to S. Giorgio, but later to S. Marco, and took a particular interest in the scuole in general and, in particular, the Scuola di S. Maria dei Battuti della Carit…. He presented the reliquary to that body, reserving its use for his lifetime. However, in May 1472, when preparing to leave Rome to go to France as Legate, foreseeing his own death, the Cardinal despatched the reliquary to Venice. A letter of 6 July 1472 (Polacco, p. 88) records the festa on the arrival of the reliquary and the procession marking its translation from S. Marco to the Scuola and the altar already prepared for it in the Sala dell' Albergo of this by Gentile Bellini. Bessarion himself died at Ravenna on 19 November of the same year. THE BESSARION RELIQUARY The reliquary was constructed in three stages. The earliest of these is the central crucifix (a croceteca ) which contains fragments of the True Cross and of Christ's shirt. It is of silver gilt, and measures 34.5 by 17.5 cm. Polacco believes it to be of fourteenth- century date. Later inscriptions establish that the cross was subsequently embellished by order of Irene Paleologa, niece of the Emperor John, and that she presented this to her confessor Gregory, who had in 1446 become Patriarch of Constantinople and took it to Italy, where he left the reliquary to his friend, Cardinal Bessarion, on his death in 1459. Irene's contribution was to mount the crucifix in a case of gold, measuring 46 x 31 cm., with reliefs of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel above and, flanking the Cross, representations of the Emperor Constantine and his mother, the Empress Helena, who had discovered the True Cross. As Polacco argues, Irene's gift to the Patriarch was pointed: when he set out with the reliquary for Italy in 1446 his mission was to help to persuade the West to launch the crusade which was seen as necessary to the salvation of Byzantium from the Turks, and a relic of the True Cross, the symbolof which had secured Constantine's own crucial victory at the Milvian Bridge, had therefore a particular meaning. Bessarion himself was responsible, presumably between 1463 and 1472, for the final enrichment of the reliquary, the band of framing at the sides and below decorated in tempera on gold ground with scenes from the Passion. Into this framing fitted the reliquary cover, an icon of the Crucifixion (Polacco, p. 202, fig. 8). The scenes are described and analysed in detail by Polacco (p. 92), who considers the artist to have been a painter from Constantinople who adhered to the traditions of the Paleologuesque era, rejecting Bettini's suggestion of Andrea Ritzos (Rizzo) from Candia. The support of the reliquary must have been supplied at the same time as the framing. The reliquary itself remained in the Scuola until after the French occupation of Venice in 1797. In 1821 it was ceded by the Abate Celotti - best known for his appropriation of illuminations from the Vatican - to the Emperor Francis I of Austria: under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles the reliquary was one of the works of art restituted by Austria in 1919, when it was returned to Venice. GENTILE BELLINI Born in circa 1429, Gentile Bellini was the son of Jacopo and the younger brother of Giovanni. Trained under his father, he emerged as an independent master in the mid-1460s. His earliest dated work, the much damaged Beato Giustiniani (Venice, Accademia) is of 1464. That Gentile was knighted in 1469 by the Emperor Frederick III on his visit to Venice shows that he was already held in high esteem. Relatively few works of the period, however, survive and among those the Lederer panel is of importance for a number of reasons. It contains the earliest of Gentile's ad vivum portraits - and portraiture was a metier that the artist was to make particularly his own: in the accuracy of depiction of a major Byzantine object of devotion that was also an outstanding work of art, the panel reveals the sympathy with the near east that was later to take the artist to Constantinople and to constitute his major contribution to Venetian painting: and in the quality of the best-preserved passages - Bessarion's portrait itself, some of the Passion scenes of the reliquary, and areas of the two figures of the brothers - it demonstrates that, notwithstanding his debt to both his father and his brother, Gentile himself was a significant painter in his own right. Bellini painted a portrait of more conventional format of the Cardinal. Now lost, this is probably recorded in a canvas from the Scuola della Carit… now in the Accademia, Venice, no. 876 (F. Heinemann, Giovanni Bellini e i Belliniani, Venice, 1963, 1, p. 148, no. S.394, as a copy of the cinquecento ).