in the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical
execution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his beginnings
suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino's
pupils--one of the _discipuli_, as some of these were fond of describing
themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the
fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the
influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his
following or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of
Venice and the _Veneto_ an influence not less strong of its kind than
that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions
during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the
works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the
painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and
Borgognone--such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and,
indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion for
the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini,
the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento
development, bowed when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and S.
Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna
Gallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr.
Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under the
paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altar-piece
of S. Cristina near Treviso, the _Madonna and Child with Saints_ in the
Ellesmere collection, and the _Madonna and Child with St. Peter Martyr_
in the Naples Gallery, while in the _Marriage of St. Catherine_ at
Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards
exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour,
essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise's
death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could,
faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his