Madonna and Child

The Hermitage “Madonna” belongs to Bartolomeo Vivarini’s late period. In comparison with his most productive period of 1450–1460s, when the artist had developed a manner influenced by Andrea Mantegna – sculptural modeling of forms with a delicate treatment of light and shade, edgy outlines as if made with a chisel, an expressive rhythm of the drapery folds – during the last decade of the 15th century, at a time of the domination of Giovanni Bellini’s painting in Venice, these mechanical devices began to seem archaic. There is a close affinity between our “Madonna” and “Saint Catherine of Alexandria” (Bari, Pinacoteca “Corrado Giaquinto”), and a painting “The Madonna and Child” signed as well as ours (The Museum Correr, the Civic Museums Foundation of Venice).