Babies, Boobies, Bellini, and...Kristeva? Motherhood is crazy!

1. Bellini is definitely influenced by the "Byzantine" artistic traditions, "Mediterranean architectural manner," and "Flemish landscape paintings."
2. Bellini's position and birth order is quite confused, as well as the information about a biological mother. Anna, his father's wife, did not list or mention him in her will. This shows that he could very well have been a bastard child. There is no mother present thusly, which explains in some ways for his almost detached adoration of his Madonnas.
3. The paintings appear to have a very masculine focus that holds a pretty sexist view of the mother only existing for the son. Also, with biographical evidence, his father overrode his mother(s) will and "seductive" quality, which explains the male centric Madonna paintings.
4. Bellini's Madonnas are not baby centric at all, but are directly opposite; the mother is never really looking or connecting with the baby, revealing a sense of loss and unreachable space for the "painter as baby."
5. The "jouissance" is present within the folds of the Madonna's clothing especially in the walled off separation of the "hots" and "colds" embodied by the red and blue.
6. There is a sort of dual issue within art depicting Christ's death, but specifically within the context of Bellini that explains the Pieta and adoration of Christ, as well as clearly revealing the Virgin's serenity.
7. The paintings begin as quite Byzantine especially as the Madonna barely touching the baby (just her fingertips), then become more and more possessive, causing the infant to increasingly fear her, then she begins to pull away from him almost completely, her serenity turning into near hostility, as well as the infant's supposed strangulation of her leading her into guilty territory. At the end, everything is separated and the infant now fearfully clings to a man, entrusting his babyhood to a saint and realizing his abandoning by his mother.
8. His wife and son died within that span of time which caused him to retract the seductive Madonna but to at last use paternity as a path to reclaiming the maternal experience and greater capture the jouissance.