Social History of Art

My essay on this work is posted under ESSAYS BY PERIOD (scroll down to 15th Italian). My essay discusses Christian vs. classical ideas on the nude, beauty and old age, sin and mortality, and the new "rhetorical" art of emotion developed in the Early Renaissance. Bellini's drunken Noah resembles not just the Dead Christ in a Lamentation but also the sleeping nymph, stripped by an onlooker, a theme Bellini himself helped revive from antiquity.