Lot 168
  • 168

Pietro da Vicenza Vicenza(?) 1467 - 1527 Mantua

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Description

  • Pietro da Vicenza
  • The Madonna adoring the Christ Child, a landscape beyond
  • oil on panel, unframed, the reverse branded with a panelmaker's mark upper centre

Provenance

Maria Sarre collection, Ascona, by 1967;
Thence by inheritance.

Literature

L. Puppi, "Album Vicentino. II", in Arte Veneta, vol. XXI, 1967, p. 209, reproduced fig. 266 (as Pietro da Vicenza).

Catalogue Note

As his name would imply, Pietro da Vicenza was probably born in Vicenza and he is thought to have trained in the workshop of Bartolomeo Montagna (c.1450-1523), the leading artist in that city during the last quarter of the 15th and first quarter of the 16th Century. His apprenticeship with Montagna probably dates from the second half of the 1480s and it is quite likely that this painting dates from around this period, or shortly after it in circa 1490. The iconography of the Madonna adoring the Christ Child on a parapet repeatedly appears in Montagna's works and these, in turn, are influenced by those of his contemporaries Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina. The latter seems also to be the over-riding inspiration for Pietro da Vicenza's only signed work, his Christ at the Column, in the Museo Correr, Venice (inv. 222), which may be compared to this painting of The Madonna and Child in its incisive handling. Puppi (see Literature) dated this work to circa 1490, comparing it with Pietro's Christ at the Column and Montagna's Madonna in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

The attribution to Pietro da Vicenza was first proposed in a letter dated 20 September 1966 (a copy of which is available) by Prof. Lionello Puppi, author of the monograph on Bartolomeo Montagna, to whom this picture was once attributed.