MONTAGNA, BARTOLOMEO. – Painter, born perhaps at Orzinuovi (Brescia), active in Vicenza, where he died on 11 October 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, several canvases that were destroyed in a fire in 1485. In Venice he was able to bring himself up to date through contact with the works of Giov. Bellini, with whom he was confused in the Pietà of the Vatican Pinacoteca (later recognized as the cimasa of Giambellino’s Pesaro altarpiece); with Carpaccio, with whom he was likewise confused in the altarpiece with the Madonna, the Child and saints in the Pinacoteca of Vicenza (Longhi); and above all with Antonello, from whom M. derives the volumetric solidity of his images. These various influences, still combined uncertainly, appear in the small picture in the Galleria Carrara in Bergamo, with the Virgin, the Child and two saints,
which is his earliest dated work (1487); but Antonellesque characteristics predominate in a group of Madonnas with the Child (New York, Metropolitan Museum and Kress Collection; London, National Gallery and Farrer Collection; Vicenza, Museum, etc.), among which that in the Museo civico of Belluno, in the grand geometry of its composition and its pursuit of perspective, seems to be directly inspired by the master from Messina. From this early period, before the beginning of the century, date his most successful works, meditated in the severe nobility of their composition and limpid in their clear, cool colors: the altarpiece of S. Bartolomeo in the Galleria of Vicenza, derived from Antonello’s Venetian altarpiece for S. Cassiano, but with the background opening onto a bright, milky sky; the small altarpiece with the Virgin adoring the Child between two female saints, also in the Galleria of Vicenza; and the altarpiece with the Pietà in the sanctuary of Monte Berico (1500). The rustic freshness of the earliest works is absent from the grand altarpiece completed in 1499 for S. Michele in Vicenza, now in Brera, in which the grandiose composition becomes ponderous. This Baroque enlargement, and the attempt to soften the surfaces, perhaps with the aim of adapting himself to the new sixteenth-century styles, become more pronounced in other works of these years (the Berlin altarpiece, 1500; the altarpiece in the Galleria of Venice, 1507); but in the surviving compartments 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 (the altarpiece in S. Corona in Vicenza; the fresco in the Scuola del Santo in Padua), in which the constructive solidity has diminished and the color becomes somber and opaque.
A follower of M. was his son BENEDETTO, whose activity is documented from 1522 to 1541: he was a rather mediocre painter, but an engraver of considerable technical skill and versatile inspiration.