PREVITALI, ANDREA, also called CORDEGLIAGHI — The Virgin with the Child; at the sides, portraits of the spouses Casotti — Bergamo, Galleria Carrara.
In numerous works he signs himself “disciple of Giovanni Bellini,” but his temperament as a facile and rapid assimilator has led him, in turn, to be associated with various other artists: in his youthful period, the happiest, with Cima and Carpaccio, from whom he derives a clarity of plastic conception and a freshness and luminosity of colour that are among the chief merits of his works. Belonging to these years are a Madonna with Donor of 1502 (Museo civico di Padova), a Sacra conversazione in Berlin, a Marriage of s. Catherine in the National Gallery in London (another very similar one in S. Giobbe in Venice), and the beautiful Annunciation in the Sanctuary of Meschio (Vittorio Veneto), whose luminous landscape confirms the attribution to P. of the pastoral scenes in the National Gallery, formerly believed to be by Giorgione. From 1510 until his death, P. was in Bergamo, where he was very markedly influenced by Lotto, who settled in that city shortly after him. From this period are: the Baptist and other saints in the church of S. Spirito (1515), still akin to the Belliniani, such as Catena and Basaiti; the Madonna with the Casotti family in the Accademia Carrara, decidedly Lottesque, rich in colour but with an unpleasant bombast of forms that would reappear, intensified, in later works: the Crucifixion of 1523, in S. Alessandro della Croce, and the S. Benedetto and saints in the Cathedral (1521). Other works include: a youthful S. Sebastiano at Aix (Longhi), the Trinity at Alzano Maggiore (1517), etc.