(active in Venice, c. 1450–1491)
Madonna and Child,
tempera on panel, gold ground, 32 x 24.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Bologna, 1947;
Salocchi collection, Florence;
Private European collection

Bartolomeo’s style was, from the beginning, distinct from that of his brother Antonio Vivarini. He appears to have been trained in Padua in the orbit of Squarcione, probably in the late 1440s. Bartolomeo emerged in 1450 when he signed jointly with Antonio a large-scale polyptych (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) for the Certosa di Bologna, a commission of some importance. While it is probably impossible to distinguish the hands of the brothers in the Bologna Polyptych, the type of the central Virgin and Child is repeated by Bartolomeo in several depictions of the Virgin in the following decade. From the very beginning, therefore, Bartolomeo’s role in the production of such polyptychs would seem to have been substantial, even dominant. Bartolomeo’s first dated independent work is the St Giovanni Capistrano (1459; Paris, Louvre) and thereafter his practice seems to have developed rapidly. During the 1460s and 1470s he was regularly employed on commissions in Venice itself, almost all of them for altarpieces. From 1464 until the late 1470s Bartolomeo enjoyed great success in Venice, painting a series of works for major altars in the Certosa di S Andrea, the Frari and SS Giovanni e Paolo, often under the patronage of leading Venetian families such as the Morosini and the Corner, as well as producing smaller but high-quality works for the scuole piccole and for parish churches. In these, Bartolomeo brought the Vivarini altarpiece up to date, gradually replacing Gothic frames with Renaissance ones and sometimes gold backgrounds with sky. This last development is by no means consistent, however, and it was surely partly to his adaptability that Bartolomeo owed his success. Bartolomeo also continued to work in the Marches and Puglia.

The saints in Bartolomeo’s best altarpieces are more psychologically intense than those of his brother and strongly characterized as contrasting types. Contemplative rather than dramatic, they nonetheless give out a sense of nervous interior life, which adds a new dimension to the devotional ends they are designed to serve. During the mid-1470s, the period of his greatest success, Bartolomeo also painted an important and original Sacra conversazione (1475; ex-Certosa di Padua; Lussingrande, S Antonio Abate) in which saints and angels, with God the Father above, surround the Virgin and Child set in a landscape. The style of this work appears, perhaps because of its Paduan provenance, to be more linear than in the Venetian altarpieces and the relationship between Bartolomeo and Crivelli is at its strongest. During the 1480s, however, Bartolomeo’s works became increasingly linear and schematic and their quality declined, coinciding with a decline in his Venetian practice. He developed a new area of patronage in the small towns and villages around Bergamo, which vied with one another in the scale and splendour of the altarpieces that they commissioned from him.

As well as altarpieces, Bartolomeo painted a large number of pictures of the Virgin and Child, mostly, after an initial Paduan phase, very like each other. He also painted a few smaller devotional images, such as the small Sacra conversazione (1465; Naples, Capodimonte) in which the Virgin is seated on a Renaissance-style throne and courtly elements from Giovanni d’Alemagna and Antonio are fused with Paduan features. It was perhaps, given its comparatively small scale, for private devotion.