Giovanni Bellini, the San Giobbe altarpiece, and the imitatio Christi

• Main Author: Dawson, Terence
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::American
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/101506; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/24164
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This article explores some of the unexplored details of Giovanni Bellini's rightly famous altarpiece for San Giobbe: the choice of the six saints depicted, the emphasis on the gaze of each, the unusual expression of the Christ-child, the curious gesture that the Madonna makes with her left hand, and the function of the eye-catching angel-musicians. Its purpose is to illustrate Jung's insistence that one should “stick” with the image, to suggest that an artist's struggle to realize his or her inner vision is about being able to see and understand intuitions that others miss, and to propose that a work of art can harbor a struggle with “meaning” that is just as intense as that which faces the analysand who wrestles to understand the deepest implications of his or her dreams and fantasies.