Gentile Bellini (c.1429 – 1507)

• Was an Italian painter.
• He came from Venice's leading family of painters.
• His younger brother was Giovanni Bellini.
• From 1474 he was the official portrait artist for the Doges of Venice.
• In 1479 he was sent to Constantinople by the Venetian government when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II requested an artist; he returned the next year.
• Thereafter a number of his subjects were set in the East, and he is one of the founders of the Orientalist tradition in Western painting.
• His portrait of the Sultan was also copied in paintings and prints and became known all over Europe.
• Gentile's earliest signed work is The Blessed Lorenzo Giustinian (1445), one of the oldest surviving oil paintings in Venice (now at the Accademia Museum).
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