BARTOLOMEO VENETO
Italian Painter, ca.1470-1531
Italian painter. He worked in Venice, the Veneto and Lombardy in the early decades of the 16th century. Knowledge of him is based largely on the signatures, dates and inscriptions on his works. His early paintings are small devotional pictures; later he became a fashionable portraitist. His earliest dated painting, a Virgin and Child (1502; Venice, priv. col., see Berenson, i, pl. 537), is signed 'Bartolomeo half-Venetian and half-Cremonese'. The inscription probably refers to his parentage, but it also suggests the eclectic nature of his development. This painting is clearly dependent on similar works by Giovanni Bellini and his workshop, but in a slightly later Virgin and Child (1505; Bergamo, Gal. Accad. Cararra) the sharp modelling of the Virgin's headdress and the insistent linear accents in the landscape indicate Bartolomeo's early divergence from Giovanni's depiction of light and space. An inscription on his Virgin and Child of 1510 (Milan, Ercolani Col.) states that he was a pupil of Gentile Bellini, an assertion supported by the tightness and flatness of his early style. The influence of Giovanni is still apparent in the composition of the Circumcision (1506; Paris, Louvre), although the persistent stress on surface patterns and the linear treatment of drapery and outline is closer to Gentile. Bartolomeo's experience as a painter at the Este court in Ferrara (1505-8) probably encouraged the decorative emphasis of his style. In the half-length Portrait of a Man (c. 1510; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam) the flattened form of the fashionably dressed sitter is picked out against a deep red curtain so that the impression of material richness extends across the entire picture surface.
ID: 63841 Portrait of a Gentleman 1512 Oil on panel, 73 x 58 cm Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome Earlier this picture was described as a work of Leonardo. Later, the panel was attributed to Holbein. Finally, of exceptionally high quality, the painting was given to Bartolomeo Veneto by comparing it to two other portraits by the same painter, now at Houston and Washington. The proposed dating is the second decade of the sixteenth century (perhaps 1512), in the wake of Bartolomeo's sojourn in Ferrara between 1506 and 1508. Bartolomeo Veneto (Bartolommeo Veneziano) attracted attention at the end of the 19th century. He was a pupil of Gentile Bellini, he worked at the Court of the Grand Duke of Ferrara and elsewhere. There he came under the influence of LOmbard artists. The artist enriched his original Venetian pictorial language with direct exposure to the influence of Albrecht D?rer, who had been active in Venice in the first years of the sixteenth century. The figures of the knight and the soldier, visible in the background, are literally copied from a 1496 woodcut by D?rer. The identity of the sitter, however, remains a mystery. We do know, however, that he must have been a gentleman attached to the Mantuan court of the Gonzagas. Recently, it was suggested that Bartolomeo Veneto may have been the talented portraitist working in Raphael's workshop who was responsible for the faces of the chair-bearers in the Vatican Palace's Mass of Bolsena. Several inscriptions are legible in the painting: on the medal of the sitter's beret is written "Probasti e Chognovisti"; on the placard above the animal on the medal are the Greek letters epsilon and tau; and along the edge of the plaquette that decorates the sword handle, "IN(?) B:VF" and "NO SPI(E)".Artist:BARTOLOMEO VENETO Title: Portrait of a Gentleman Painted in 1501-1550 , Italian - - painting : portrait
