Nativity 1445

Jacopo Bellini made this pen and ink drawing, titled “Nativity,” sometime in the mid-15th century. Bellini was part of a Venetian painting dynasty during the early Renaissance. His patrons were members of the elite ruling class, keen to display their wealth and status through art. Bellini and his contemporaries secured lucrative commissions, making the Church, and religious themes, into a powerful cultural and economic institution. Here, we can see the religious scene of the Nativity located within a very real, contemporary, Italian landscape. Bellini was invested in this move toward a new kind of naturalism. By drawing on paper, Bellini created portable works that could be easily shared. These drawings and sketchbooks promoted and disseminated his ideas, and established a new role for the artist as an intellectual with a unique vision. To understand the full significance of Bellini’s work, historians examine a wide range of sources, from financial documents and social histories, to the diaries and letters of the artists themselves. It is through this type of interdisciplinary investigation that we can better understand how art both shapes, and is shaped by, its historical context.