VINCENZO CATENA. — Venetian painter, born c. 1470, died in 1531; he is recorded in 1506 as a “collega” (colleague) of Giorgione in the inscription on the verso of the Giorgionesque Female Portrait in the Vienna Gallery.
His formation was particularly influenced by the models of G. Bellini, as well as by the drawing of Alvise Vivarini and the spatial sense of Cima (Madonna and Four Saints, Walters Collection, Baltimore; Madonna Enthroned and Doge Loredan, Correr Museum, Venice, c. 1505). This quattrocento taste persists even in works where, under the impulse of the later Giambellino and Giorgione himself, Catena sought greater breadth of modelling through a softer use of colour that tended toward a new fusion of tone (Adoring Madonna and Saints, Berlin Museum, and especially the Martyrdom of St Christina in S. Maria Mater Domini, Venice [1520]).
The Delivery of the Keys in the Prado, and more so the replica in the Gardner Collection, the Christ at Emmaus in Bergamo, the Adoration of the Child in London, and finally Judith in the Querini-Stampalia Collection, demonstrate Catena’s extreme evolution within the new Venetian pictorial direction of the 16th century. A separate moment in his activity is represented by the Holy Family in Dresden, where a Raffaellesque interest is reflected.
Michiel extolled Catena’s pictorial work, as did Ridolfi, who praised his portraits (notably those of Roimond Fugger in Berlin and that of a Senator [?] in Vienna).