Ascribed to Benedetto Diana in the 1960s, but probably a late work of Cima. Canvas (transferred from panel), 83 x 68.īadly worn and dull in appearance. Overshadowed by his great contemporaries (Giorgione and the young Titian as well as Bellini), he is often overlooked in histories of Renaissance art and even in surveys of Venetian painting. But he was an uneven artist, who seems to have maintained a substantial studio and often repeated his own compositions. He shared much of Bellini’s feeling for light and colour, and his best works are executed with meticulous craftsmanship. His style, still essentially Quattrocento, evolved little over three decades, though his later works show some softening of contours and a wider colour range. His picturesque and beautifully detailed landscape backgrounds evoke the hilly scenery around Conegliano.
He is not known to have painted independent portraits. He died in 1517 or 1518 and was buried on 3 September in ‘the church of the friars’, possibly the Frari in Venice but more probably San Francesco at Conegliano.Ĭima’s major works are altarpieces (some thirty of which survive), but he also painted many smaller panels of Madonnas or Saints and a few small panels of mythological subjects. He is thought to have returned to Conegliano in 1516, when he bought some property there. In 1514 he was living in an apartment in the Palazzo Corner Piscopia (later Loredan), near the Rialto Bridge. He was probably resident there by 1486 (if he is the ‘Magister Zambatista pictor’ of Venice who in that year painted a standard for the cobblers’ guild in Conegliano), and he was certainly living there in 1492 (when he is referred to as a ‘pictor eximius Venetiis’ in a contract for an altarpiece for Conegliano Cathedral). He spent almost his entire career in Venice. Early writers (Vasari, Sansovino and Ridolfi) say that he was a pupil or disciple of Giovanni Bellini, who was undoubtedly his greatest influence. He is assumed to have reached the age of majority of 14 in 1473-74, when his name first appears in his father’s tax declaration, implying that he was born in 1459 or 1460.
His father was a cloth-dresser ( cimatore di panni). Giovanni Battista Cima is usually called Cima da Conegliano after his native town in the northern Veneto.
0 kommentar(er)
