Giovanni Bellini (1431?-1516), Venetian painter, was the brother of Gentile Bellini. Like Perugino, he has often been defined in terms of his pupils and successors, particularly Giorgione and Titian. During his long career he specialised in devotional pictures, particularly images of the Virgin, but perhaps in answer to changes of taste initiated by Giorgione he produced some paintings on mythological subjects in the later part of his career. He also moved from the use of egg tempera to the northern preference for oil-painting. Dürer, writing to Pirckheimer from Venice in 1506, remarked that Bellini was very old, but certainly the best painter of them all (quoted in Pignatti, Giovanni Bellini: L'opera completa, p. 9). As far as Vasari was concerned, the fact that Giovanni Bellini had not studied the art of the ancients led to a 'hard, dry and laboured style' ( Vasari, Le Vite, Testo IV.7 and Vasari, Le Vite, Testo VI.155).
Reynolds objected to the detail of Bellini and his predecessors: they 'finished every hair' ( Reynolds, Discourses, p. 195), but it was the truth of the detail, and the religious belief of Bellini (though the assertion at Works, 7.289 may be false), which characterised his greatness. For Ruskin on Giovanni Bellini, as for Reynolds, he is the last of the artists of the old style - a definitive pre-Raphaelite, perhaps - but for Ruskin, though not for Reynolds, the change which followed was a change for the worse