The notebooks of Jacopo Bellini, the early Renaissance Venetian painter, confront art historians with one of their peskiest examples of the problem of trying to explain what a work of art is all about. In Bellini’s case the problem is often resolved by not bringing it up at all. That option will be more difficult following this attractive publication of The Louvre Album of Drawings. Heretofore this notebook and the second one, in the British Museum, could be studied only in very limited selections or in two rare deluxe facsimile editions, published some seventy years ago. Fragility has rightly limited access to the originals. Other factors, too, have made it possible to get away with silence about them. The most obvious is that Bellini’s paintings are mostly lost so that we are not often faced with the part of his work that would normally provide our main access to him. Drawings generally are looked at, except by the most devoted specialists, as annexes to the rest of an artist’s work. Another factor is Jacopo’s position as the father and father-in-law of two great painters, Giovanni Bellini and Mantegna, not to mention his other son Gentile, a remarkable and quite visible painter. Since Jacopo has impressed us less actively, it has been easy to tag him with the pathetic or awkward role of a Leopold Mozart, and leave it at that. It is quite true that his paternal status is significant, and the notebooks are linked directly to this