Catena, Vincenzo

CATENA, VINCENZO. - Venetian painter, b. c. 1470, d. 1531; he is recorded in 1506 as a "colleague" of Giorgione in the inscription on the verso of Giorgione's Female Portrait in the Vienna gallery.

His formation was shaped particularly by the models of G. Bellini, as well as by the draughtsmanship of Alvise Vivarini and the spatial qualities of Cima (Madonna and Four Saints, Walters collection, Baltimore; Madonna Enthroned with Doge Loredano, Correr museum, Venice, c. 1505). This quattrocento taste of his persists even in the works in which, under the impulse of the later Bellini and of Giorgione himself, C. sought greater breadth of modelling through a softer use of color tending toward a new fusion of tone (Madonna Adoring the Child with Saints, Berlin museum, and above all the Martyrdom of St. Christina in S. Maria Mater Domini in Venice [1520]). The Delivery of the Keys in the Prado, and still more the replica in the Gardner collection, the Christ at Emmaus in Bergamo, the Adoration of the Child in London, and finally the Judith in the Querini-Stampalia collection, demonstrate the extreme evolution of C. within the new Venetian pictorial direction of the 16th century; a separate moment in his activity is represented by the Holy Family in Dresden, in which a Raphaelesque interest is reflected.

Michiel extolled C.'s pictorial work, and so did Ridolfi, who praised his portraits (especially noteworthy are those of Raimond Fugger in Berlin and that of Senator [?] in Vienna).