What made Giovanni Bellini such a great artist?

Question

I am doing a project on renaissance art for my history class, and I have done a little bit of research on Giovanni Bellini. I do not know much about art in general, so what made Giovanni Bellini such a good artist for his time? Thank you!

Answer 1

Bellini's work was unusually naturalistic (which is not the same as "realistic"), and atmospheric for its time, focussing on rich color and surfaces and, largely, on landscape elements. He really was something of a pioneer in Italian painting for these reasons and because of his skill with oil painting, a medium adopted from northern European painters. His influence on subsequent Venetian artists was very significant.

Answer 2

In his early pictures, Bellini worked with tempera, combining a severe and rigid style with a depth of religious feeling and gentle humanity. From the beginning he was a painter of natural light. In his earliest pictures the sky is often reflected behind human figures in streaks of water that make horizontal lines in narrow strips of landscape. The Agony in the Garden was the first of a series of Venetian landscape scenes that continued to develop for the next century. Four triptychs (a triptych is a set of three panels used as an altarpiece) in the Venice Accademia and two Pietas, both in Milan, are all from this early period. Bellini's St. Vincent Ferrer altarpie