BARTOLOMEO DA MONTAGNA. — Painter, born perhaps in Orzinuovi (Brescia), active in Vicenza where he died on 11 Oct. 1523.
In 1482 he was commissioned by the Scuola Grande di S. Marco in Venice to execute, together with Giovanni and Gentile Bellini and L. Bastiani, some canvases that were destroyed in a fire in 1485. In Venice he was able to update himself by studying the works of Giovanni Bellini, with whom he was confused in the Pietà in the Vatican Pinacoteca (later recognized as the crowning element of the Pesaro altarpiece by Giambellino); of Carpaccio, with whom he was also confused in the altarpiece with the Madonna, Child and Saints in the Pinacoteca of Vicenza (Longhi); and above all of Antonello, from whom M. derives the volumetric solidity of his figures. These various influences appear, still uncertainly combined, in the small panel in the Galleria Carrara in Bergamo, with the Virgin, Child and two saints, which is his earliest dated work (1487); but Antonellian traits predominate in a group of Madonnas with Child (New York, Metropolitan Museum and Kress Collection; London, National Gallery and Farrer Collection; Vicenza, Museum, etc.), among which that in the Civic Museum of Belluno, with its grand geometric composition and its search for perspective, seems directly inspired by the master from Messina. Of this early period, before the turn of the century, are the most successful works, characterized by the severe nobility of composition and clear, cold colours: the altarpiece of S. Bartolomeo in the Gallery of Vicenza, derived from the Venetian altarpiece by Antonello for S. Cassiano, but with the background open to a milky sky; the small altarpiece with the Virgin adoring the Child between two saints, also in the Gallery of Vicenza; and the altarpiece of the Pietà in the sanctuary of Monte Berico (1500). The fresh vigour of his earliest works is lacking in the grand altarpiece completed in 1499 for S. Michele in Vicenza, now in the Brera, in which the grandiose composition becomes ponderous. This Baroque expansion, and the attempt to soften the surfaces, perhaps in an effort to adapt to the new 16th-century styles, is accentuated in other works of these years (Berlin altarpiece, of 1500; altarpiece in the Gallery of Venice, of 1507); but in the surviving fragments of the polyptych for the church of SS. Nazaro e Celso (1507) there is still an austere nobility of form. The decline is greater in other later works (altarpiece in S. Corona in Vicenza; fresco in the Scuola del Santo in Padua), in which the constructive solidity is diminished and the colour becomes dull and opaque.
A follower of M. was his son BENEDETTO, whose activity is documented from 1522 to 1541: a very mediocre painter, but an engraver of notable technical skill and versatile inspiration.