THE FEAST

OF THE GODS
HOW THREE ARTIST UNITED

a Divine Party

Finished just two years before Giovanni Bellini’s death, The Feast of the Gods was an unlikely

subject for this Venetian master. Bellini challenged himself by creating this raucous scene of 17

classical gods and goddesses eating and drinking in a lush forest clearing, painted in brilliantly

rich, blended colors typical of the Venetian school of painting.

He later sent this large work from Venice to Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, who hanged in his

Camerino, a private study modeled after an ancient painting gallery. After the canvas’s arrival in

Ferrara in 1514 though, the painting’s surface appeared to have been damaged in the varnishing

process. Alfonso then asked a local painter, Dosso Dossi, to repaint the left-hand background with

a hill and amend the tree foliage at upper right. Covering Bellini’s shallow stage for his figures,

behind which was a continuous line of tree trunks illuminated by warm sunlight (the only passage

of which survives at the far right). But the painting today is the result of yet another change.

Since Bellini died in 1516, Alfonso commissioned one of his students, the ambitious young Titian, to

provide three works for his Camerino, and it is Titian himself who in 1529 painted out Dosso’s

landscape with a striking mountainous backdrop, leaving only Dosso’s foliage and the pheasant in

the right-hand tree to stylistically unite it with others of his hanging in Alfonso’s Camerino, a

Renaissance space dedicated to the rebirth of classical art.

Priyanka Larasathi - Art HIstory & Culture 2017/2018 - Art History Term 2
The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529

Oil on canvas

67 × 74 in

170.2 × 188 cm

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.