MONTAGNA, BARTOLOMEO. - Painter, b. perhaps at Orzinuovi (Brescia), active at Vicenza where he d. 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 which were destroyed in a fire in 1485. In Venice he was able to bring himself up to date through contact with the works of Giovanni Bellini, with whom he was confused in the Pietà of the Pinacoteca Vaticana (later recognized as the cimasa of Giambellino's Pesaro altarpiece); with those of Carpaccio, with whom he was likewise confused in the altarpiece with the Madonna, the Child and saints of the Pinacoteca of Vicenza (Longhi); and above all with those of Antonello, from whom M. derives the volumetric solidity of his images. These various influences appear, still uncertainly combined, in the small picture of the Galleria Carrara at 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, Museo, etc.), among which that of the Museo civico of Belluno, in the grandiose geometry of its composition and in its perspectival research, seems inspired directly by the Messinese master. To this first period, before the turn of the century, belong his happiest works, meditated in the severe nobility of their composition, limpid in their light and cool colours: the altarpiece of St. Bartholomew in the Gallery of Vicenza, derived from Antonello's Venetian altarpiece for S. Cassiano, but with the background open onto a clear milky sky; the small altarpiece with the Virgin adoring the Child between two saints, likewise in the Gallery of Vicenza; the altarpiece with the Pietà in the sanctuary of Monte Berico (1500). The rustic freshness of the more youthful works is lacking in the grandiose altarpiece completed in 1499 for S. Michele of Vicenza, now at Brera, in which the grandiose composition grows heavy. This baroque expansion, and the attempt to soften the surfaces, perhaps with the intention of adapting to the new sixteenth-century manners, is accentuated in other works of these years (altarpiece of Berlin, of 1500; altarpiece of the Gallery of Venice, of 1507); but in the surviving compartments of the polyptych for the church of SS. Nazaro and Celso (1507) there is still an austere nobility of form. The decline is greater in other, later works (altarpiece in S. Corona at Vicenza; fresco of the Scuola del Santo at Padua), in which the constructive solidity is diminished and the colour becomes sad and opaque.
A follower of M. is his son BENEDETTO, whose activity is documented from 1522 to 1541: he is a very mediocre painter, but an engraver of notable technical skill and versatile inspiration.