Altarpieces in or from Venetian churches
(15th-16th centuries)

Review of the principal painters

In the first half of the 15th century, the arrival of the Florentine sculptors and painters determined the evolution of Venetian painting. At that time Antonio Vivarini (who was partnered by his brother-in-law Giovanni d'Alemagna of German origins) and Jacopo Bellini were the chiefs of the two dynasties of painters in Murano and Venice. The tendencies were defined about 1450. The one became more descriptive; the chief representatives were Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio. Under the leadership of Mantegna, head of the Paduan school and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini, the second - with Bartolomeo Vivarini and Carlo Crivelli - moved in the direction of sculptural, which Giovanni Bellini tempered by soft colours; to this group belonged Alvise Vivarini, Cima da Conegliano, Marco Basaiti and Lazzaro Bastiani. About 1475 Antonello da Messina introduced the Flemish style in Venice.

Giovanni Bellini, the real founder of the Venetian school, had the largest and most important workshop in Venice and trained most of the younger generation: Giorgione, Titian, Palma Vecchio, Sebastiano del Piombo.

In the early years of the 16th century the decisive innovator in Venice was the short-lived Giorgione. He influenced the early work of his friend and collaborator Titian, the greatest Venetian. Titian reinterpreted allegory, enhancing it with a much richer and more varied grid of cultural references; he continued Giorgione's fusion of colours, developing a much deeper softness and naturalism.

After Giorgione and Titian, Palma Vecchio, Sebastiano del Piombo, Cariani, Bonifacio Veronese, Paris Bordone showed themselves to be colourists of great merit. Lorenzo Lotto spread far and wide the lessons of Venice, to which he gave a highly original interpretation. The last two representatives of he Venetian school of the 16th century, Tintoretto and Veronese, were virtuosi of mural decoration, affected by the Mannerist trend, which Pordenone and Schiavone continued in Venice.

Deriving from Titian and Tintoretto, the members of the Bassano family, headed by Jacopo Bassano, were the forerunners of the naturalism and lighting effects of Caravaggio.

15th-century altarpieces

The Vivarini workshop

The most opulent late-Gothic altarpieces were richly gilded and often surrounded by spectacular carved cornices. Michele di Matteo, an artist from Bologna, executed the Polyptych of Sant'Elena c. 1427. The best altarpieces were produced by the flourishing workshop founded on Murano by Antonio Vivarini. In the 1440s, Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d'Alemagna began to produce a series of sumptuous polyptychs. They worked together closely, so that it is not easy to distinguish one to the other. The three polyptychs in the church of San Zaccaria, Polyptych of the Body of Christ, Polyptych of Santa Sabina, and the Polyptych of the Virgin are the most noteworthy of these. Late Gothic, Byzantine, and Renaissance elements blend in the large altarpiece Coronation of the Virgin in the church San Pantalon.

Antonio de Negroponte's altarpiece, the Madonna and Child Enthroned, rich in cultural allusions, is fundamental to our understanding of how Venetian painting developed in the mid-fifteenth century, quite apart from the rivalry between Antonio Vivarini and Jacopo Bellini.

Bartolomeo Vivarini, the younger brother of Antonio had a long career in the flourishing family workshop. From the start he was stimulated by the new artistic developments in Padua, where he may have trained. The influence of Andrea Mantegna appears in the hard, sculptural forms, statuesque modeling, and sharp outlines of his figures; to these qualities Bartolomeo added clear, brilliant colouring. Between 1460 and 1475 he produced a large number of paintings, especially polyptychs for Venetian churches. One of the best of these is the triptych in the Santa Maria Formosa representing the Madonna della Misericordia in the centre. After this, the growing success of Giovanni Bellini made Bartolomeo's work appear conservative and even antiquated. Lazzaro Bastiani completed c. 1475 his St Veneranda altarpiece in the church of Corpus Domini.


The Bellini workshop

The Triptych of St Sebastian, a work of the Bellini workshop under the direction of Jacopo Bellini for an altar of the Santa Maria della Carità, can be considered a kind of dress rehearsal for Giovanni Bellini's first important public assignment: the polyptych of St Vincent Ferrer, executed for the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Although the splendid original frame gives unity to the separate paintings, this polyptych was probably the fruit of lengthy collaboration between different artists. While the predella is visibly inferior to the other panels, the figures of the Annunciation are of unsurpassed beauty.

Bellini's delicate, lyrical works hardly seem the work of a revolutionary painter, yet they marked a breakthrough in the history of Venetian painting. The Pesaro altarpiece depicting the Coronation of the Virgin is one of Bellini's masterpieces and a pivotal work of his mature years. (Not in Venice!)

The innovativeness of Antonello da Messina, which had already been partly assimilated by Bellini in the Pesaro altarpiece, reached its maturity, and at the same time received a complete and independent reply, in the altarpiece for the new church of San Giobbe, originally over the second altar on the right of the church. When it appeared, it immediately became one of Bellini's most celebrated works. It is one of the cornerstones of the artist's mature years. In it Bellini provided his own, personal interpretation of the monumental Sacra Conversazione. He used his mastery of perspective to set the scene in the curved apse of a church. The hollow above the group of figures is decorated with mosaics, whose warm golden light is reflected onto the figures.

The Frari triptych, although apparently more archaic in that it follows a polyptychal scheme, in many respects constitutes a further evolution of the San Giobbe Altarpiece, of which it is reminiscent in many ways. It is splendidly preserved in its original frame, designed by Bellini himself.


Cima da Conegliano

One of the most attractive Venetian painters of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was Cima da Conegliano, called after his hometown in the province of Treviso, on the mainland. His paintings are typical of the art that developed in Venice's mainland territories. They are characterized by a cold light that falls directly from above, illuminating and defining the precise outlines of the figures and the natural settings. Having based his style on the masterpieces of Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina yet incorporating all other possible contributions, Cima had created a sort of clean, uniform middle way that could always be adapted to circumstances. This strategy enabled the artist to propose, in his St John the Baptist Altarpiece for the church of Madonna dell'Orto, an architecture that was "blown open" to reveal a sweeping landscape with ample scope for the elaboration of ideas and symbols. The Baptism of Christ is considered his masterpiece and it provided a model for Giovanni Bellini's painting, some years later, of the same subject for the church of Santa Corona in Vicenza. It was this painting that made Cima's reputation among painters and the general public in Venice.

The Madonna of the Orange Tree was completed c. 1495 for the Franciscan nunnery of Santa Chiara on Murano. The dog, the rabbit, the deer, and the partridges are the animals called upon to contribute to the symbolism. The altarpiece Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints was executed in 1495-97 for the sacristy of San Michele in Isola on Murano. The Adoration of the Shepherds was painted in 1509-10 for the Carmini church. It is a modern work that adopts and flaunts all the iconological and semiotic liberties developed in the first decade of the sixteenth century.


16th-century altarpieces

Alvise Vivarini, Marco Basaiti

The death of Antonio Vivarini around 1480 marked the end of the late-Gothic tradition: now a new generation of artists was coming to the fore. Alvise Vivarini, the son of Antonio, long an assistant of his uncle Bartolomeo, realized the need to revitalize the products of the family workshop by embracing the latest innovations. His last work, the Altarpiece of the Milanese in the Frari (completed in collaboration with Marco Basaiti) could be described as the last triumph of the fifteenth century in the altars of Venice. In about 1510 Marco Basaiti completed the Call of the Sons of Zebedee for the high altar of Sant'Andrea della Certosa, the Christ praying in the Garden for a family altar at San Giobbe, and St Peter Enthroned and Four Saints for the church San Pietro di Castello, Venice. In the same period Giovanni Bellini was carrying through his gentle revolution of tonal painting. Within a very few years Vivarini's hard, sharp outlines and vivid colouring were completely outmoded.


Giovanni Bellini

Bellini's last phase is heralded with the San Zaccaria Altarpiece. According to Ridolfi (1648), the altarpiece in its own time was "considered one of the most beautiful and refined work of the master". The compositional and architectural structure of the painting is not fundamentally very different from the San Giobbe altarpiece: here too, from a spatial point of view, the painting becomes a continuation of the altar on which it is placed. But at the same time the landscape appearing from the sides pour forth into the air a light that softens the forms. The tonal colour gains the upper hand, creating a new harmony of broad planes, softened forms, and a warm sense of the air.

Bellini's altarpiece with Saints Christopher, Jerome and Louis of Toulouse in the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo was signed and dated in 1513. It is his last great religious work, painted when he was an octogenarian. However, the painting was commissioned in 1494. The almost twenty years that elapsed between the ordering and the execution of the altarpiece, and the modifications of the instructions of the commissioner in this period, makes it difficult to understand the iconographic program of the painting.


Giorgione

Giorgione is generally and justifiably regarded as the founder of Venetian painting of the 16th century. Within a brief career of no more than 15 years, he created a radically innovative style based on a novel pictorial technique, which provided the starting point for the art of Titian. Although he specialized above all in relatively small-scale pictures, he produced an altarpiece still in the cathedral of Giorgione's home town of Castelfranco: the Virgin Enthroned with Sts George and Francis (the Castelfranco Altarpiece), painting with attribution unanimously accepted by modern criticism.


Vittore Carpaccio

During the first and second decades of the sixteenth century, Vittore Carpaccio completed several altarpieces of varying quality, the Presentation in the church of San Giobbe being one of Carpaccio's best. The perfect perspective of the setting and the geometrical forms of the details were typical of Renaissance painting. The artist chose a solemn, symmetrical layout of measured dignity, enlivened by the casual poses of the musician angels and Carpaccio's attentions to the details of setting and costume.

Carpaccio's St George and the Dragon in the San Giorgio Maggiore is a replica of the large canvas in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni with a richer narrative texture. The Apotheosis of the Ten Thousand Martyrs adorned an altar in the church of Sant'Antonio di Castello. It is a crowded and complicated, narrative oriented altarpiece. Although the figures in the Glory of St Vitalis lack freshness, the composition has a solemn grandeur, with the spectacular invention of the bridge over which pass the saints in the upper part of the painting.


Artists from other parts of Italy

The artists who dominated the first decade, and much of the second, of the sixteenth century were still the older ones. The first of the new arrivals to emerge was Sebastiano del Piombo, who made his mark with several major public works. His San Giovanni Crisostomo Altarpiece was completed in 1510-11 for the high altar of the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo.

Giovanni Antonio da Lodi from Lombardy brought with him in a watered-down form, the rather sentimental, dawdling rhythms of Perugino and the fusions and characterization of Leonardo da Vinci, as seen in his Murano altarpiece. Vincenzo Catena, represented by his Santa Cristina Altarpiece, was a defender of Giovanni Bellini's heritage. Bernardo Licinio, an artist from Bergamo, painted altarpieces of varying quality. The most prestigious of these is in the Frari.

Palma Vecchio came from Bergamo and settled in Venice. His Assumption painted for the Scuola di Santa Maria Maggiore is rather unconvincing. His public masterpiece is the Polyptych of St Barbara in the church of Santa Maria Formosa. Girolamo Savoldo arrived from Brescia. His works in Venice corroborate the remarkable interweaving of the Lombard and Veneto linguistic repertoire with types and iconographic elements from northern Europe, as can be seen in the Adoration of the Shepherds in San Giobbe.

Bonifacio Veronese appears to have been the Venetian painter most willing to adopt new stylistic changes from central Italy. His St Michael Vanquishing the Devil is in the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

Lorenzo Lotto reacted against the chromaticism of Giorgione and reinforced the value of his cold colours by means of vigorous form, made crystalline by light. He painted the St Nicolas Altarpiece in the church of Carmini, but his Venetian masterpiece, and his only moment of random integration into the city's social history, is the Alms of St Anthony in Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

Giovanni Antonio Pordenone, a Friulian painter, was the first artist to introduce Mannerism to northern Italy. One of the most significant of Pordenone's many altarpieces is the San Lorenzo Giustinian Altarpiece. Giuseppe Salviati, a Florentine artist settled in Venice, gained a reputation around the middle of the sixteenth century with large-scale paintings for Venice's most prestigious ecclesiastical buildings. The Purification of the Virgin for the Valier altar at the Frari could be mentioned here.

As a result of recent research and exhibitions, Jacopo Bassano has been accorded a leading role in sixteenth-century Venetian painting. There are very few works by Bassano in Venice, but they trace an important path, both in chronology and content. His final period is characterized by a "scarceness of light," and an emphasis on the application of paint as well as Bassano's ability to suggest form without really drawing it. This manner is evident in his late altarpiece in San Giorgio Maggiore, in the Adoration of the Shepherds.


Titian

The transformation of the Venetian altarpiece in the opening years of the sixteenth century found its most innovative protagonist in the young Titian, who, after the death of Giorgione in 1510 and Sebastiano del Piombo's departure to Rome the following year, was left with no serious Venetian rival apart from the aging Bellini. Committing himself in the very outset of his public career to the development of new, more dynamic modes of design, Titian continued to explore the expressive possibilities inherent in the monumental 'pala', in the affective potential of its iconography and of the context of its functioning - the conventions of devotional practice and the controlling conditions of architectural site. In a series of altarpieces - from his earliest, St Mark with Sts Cosmas and Damian, Roch and Sebastian, to the Martyrdom of St Peter Martyr, completed in 1530 - Titian responded to the challenges of the genre and, adding new dimensions of vital experience to it, transformed the notion of religious vision.

The breezy confidence of the young Titian declares itself with a flourish of trumpets in his St Mark altar in Santa Maria della Salute. In this altarpiece, Titian's figures proclaim a new demonstrative clarity. Space is restricted in order to magnify their physical presence, and the strong local colours are just as important in the definition of space as the perspective and the disposition of the figures within it.

Three great altarpieces span what is generally acknowledged to be the most energetic period of Titian's development, the years between 1516 and 1530: the Assumption of the Virgin (Assunta) (c. 1516-18), the Madonna di Ca' Pesaro (1519-26), both in the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, and the Martyrdom of St Peter Martyr (1526-30), painted for the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. The last of these was destroyed by fire in 1867, but the first two are still in situ.

In 1517, after the death of Bellini, Titian received official recognition as painter to the Venetian republic. He soon decisively confirmed his artistic pre-eminence with his Assumption of the Virgin, a full-blown masterpiece on a heroic scale. The basic organization is simple: the earthbound apostles are denned within a rectangle, while the ascending Virgin and God the Father are loosely inscribed in a circle, signifying eternity. The two groups are linked by a steep triangle with its base in the two apostles in red and its apex in the Virgin, denoting her translation from earth to the heavenly sphere. Typical of Titian's realism is the way the Virgin does not levitate but walks forward naturally as she is carried aloft on the cloud. The widening gap separating her from the apostles is expressed by the gesticulating apostle in the foreground, whose fingers reach in vain toward the cloud base, and by the swinging putto to the right, the tips of whose toes have just risen above the head of the apostle in green. In the opinion of a contemporary Venetian critic, Lodovico Dolce, the Assumption of the Virgin combined the grandeur and terribilità of Michelangelo with the charm and idealization of Raphael and the colours of nature. By the Assunta, Titian established a classical High Renaissance art in Venice.

The Pesaro Altarpiece evokes the long-past military glories of Jacopo Pesaro, the Venetian noble and bishop of Paphos, locating his portrait in the presence of St Peter. The monumental apparatus includes an extraordinary gallery of portraits, those of the members of Pesaro's family.

From about 1530, Titian increasingly devoted his attention to the use of landscape not just as the scene of the events, but as a feature that plays a role in determining the pictures meaning. The most important example of this new conception, the Martyrdom of St Peter Martyr, has since been lost. (The painting presently displayed in the Basilica is an 18th-century copy by Niccolò Cassala.) Titian painted it between 1526 and 1530 for the Dominican church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. Vasari wrote of the painting that "of all the pictures painted so far by Titian this is the most finished, the most celebrated, the greatest and the best conceived and executed." Countless copies were made of the altarpiece, which was destroyed by fire in 1867. The painting was the summation of a series of pictorial solutions Titian reached in the 1520s. He achieves a new quality in this painting by linking more of the landscape, and not just the light, to the dramatic events that are unfolding. The trees appear to be sharing the movements of the protagonists: they are effectively a paraphrase of the main lines of movement of the figures.

The Martyrdom of St Lawrence, painted for the Chiesa dei Gesuiti in Venice, was completed in 1559 but had been ten years in the making. Titian in his later years seemed preoccupied with the fate of those who defied authority, and the present work is about a desperate attempt - in this case by the forces of paganism - to suppress dissent in secret and at night away from the public gaze. The sweep of the figures from upper right to lower left reinforces the curve of the trident thrust into St Lawrence's ribs and the martyr's face is brutalized by pain even as he recognizes his salvation, a ray of light punched through the cloud cover.

The Annunciation in the San Salvatore is a key religious painting of the 1560s. It is one of Titian's boldest and most freely painted late works. The traditionally acquiescent pose of the Virgin, with arms crossed as she receives the message, has been transferred to the angel since Titian has here chosen to depict the moment just after the actual Annunciation itself. The Virgin, having lifted her veil to receive the Word, remains in suspended animation as she absorbs it, while the angel stands in awestruck reverence at the implications of the news just imparted and at the mystery of the incarnation.


Paolo Veronese

Paolo Veronese came to Venice in 1553 with an impressive artistic background acquired in his native Verona. His success in his new base was astonishingly rapid. Before settling in Venice, he had already completed in the church of San Francesco della Vigna the altarpiece, called Pala Giustinian, which was commissioned by Lorenzo and Antonio Giustinian as the first stage in furnishing the newly built Franciscan church with a series of high quality altarpiece. It was closely based on Titian's Pala Pesaro in the Frari church. But this dialogue with a famous model gave rise, not to a feeble copy, but to a creative interpretation.

Between 1555 and 1565 Veronese painted a number of important works in the church of San Sebastiano. The altarpiece for the choir is carefully matched to its architectural frame. Its particular charm is the Apollonian figure of the titular saint, tied to a column, leaning forwards and gazing up in search of consolation at a cloud formation on which the Madonna is enthroned surrounded by angels making music.

In the 1560s and 1570s, Veronese consolidated his position in every field: altarpieces, church decoration, historical and civic celebration. His altarpieces often present the example of martyrdom, on other occasions they focus on more traditional, conciliatory meetings of disparate saints before the Virgin and Child. They range from the Enthroned Madonna and Child, with the Infant St John the Baptist and Saints for the sacristy of San Zaccaria, a demanding large-scale altar painting documenting the growing reputation of Veronese in Venice, to the Mystical Marriage of St Catherine for the church of Santa Caterina.

In the 1580s, the theme of the Pietà appears in Veronese's altarpieces, an example being that in the church of San Zulian. He also produced numerous pictures centering on the lives of the saints. The altarpiece of St Jerome from Sant'Andrea della Zirada the only figure present is the monumental one of St Jerome. The altarpiece is strongly characterized by penitence. His last painting, the Conversion of St Pantaleon tells the story of Pantaleon of Nicomedia, known as Pantalon in Venice. It is apparently determined entirely by the use of colour. In a vertical format, the altarpiece uses the most economical means to develop its narrative of the miraculous healing of a child by Pantaleon, a doctor, who suffered martyrdom as a Christian.


Tintoretto

Tintoretto was the last grand figure of Venetian Renaissance art. After his death, art in Venice shrank to repetitive copies, chiefly of him. He worked on many projects of decorating churches and the buildings of confraternities, of which the largest project was the decoration of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. He painted monumental ceiling and wall paintings. Assisted by his studio, he produced dozens of altarpieces for Venetian churches. He worked for the many churches in various idioms. For example, at the Crociferi he painted a tense Assumption in the style of Veronese. (The painting today is in the church of the Gesuati.)

Tintoretto's Resurrection of Christ is on the high altar of the church San Cassiano, the painter's former parish church. It is part of a decoration cycle of three large paintings, the other two being the Crucifixion, and the Descent into Hell. The three-part cycle is closely connected both in content and in form.

The Miracle of St Agnes was painted for a chapel in the former monastery church of Madonna dell'Orto, where it still hangs today. The great altarpiece was a part of the furnishings for the new Contarini family chapel. The altarpiece, now in the apex of the chapel, was at first on the left side wall, as the shift of the vanishing point to the left, the asymmetrical composition, and the way the light falls in from the right all show.

After his protracted exertions at the Scuola di San Rocco, Tintoretto's final focus of activity was the great Benedictine church of San Giorgio Maggiore, where he painted, among other large canvases, the Entombment. His last works were markedly mystical, showing almost disembodied spirits soaring through the air.



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