Son of the painter Jacopo Bellini and brother of Giovanni. His date of birth is sometimes put at 1429 (his mother, Anna Rinversi, made a will that year when pregnant with her first child), but this may be too early. According to Vasari, he was named after Gentile da Fabriano, his father’s master. His early career is obscure, but he was sufficiently famous by 1469 to be knighted by the Emperor Frederick III, who was visiting Venice that year for the carnival. In 1474 the Venetian Senate voted to accept his offer to refurbish the decorations of the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace. His cycle of history pictures, painted over many years with Giovanni Bellini among others, was totally destroyed by fire in 1577, as was his series of official portraits of the Doges of Venice.
In response to a request from the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II for a ‘good painter who knows how to make portraits’, he was sent to Constantinople for a year in 1479. The Sultan rewarded him with another knighthood and a gold chain weighing 250 crowns. Almost all the paintings he did in Constantinople are lost. His portrait medal of the Sultan and some drawings survive.
Though presumably trained by his father, his earliest pictures, like his brother Giovanni’s, show evidence of Mantegna’s influence. His style remained linear and rather dry. His major surviving works are large narrative canvases painted for the scuole (charitable lay confraternities) of Venice, which are full of portraits and picturesque views of the city. Most of his independent portraits are profiles. He died on 23 February 1507 (at the age of ‘nearly eighty’ according to Vasari) and was buried in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.