Italian Art & Architecture - Italy - page 1800

British art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has written three authoritative books on Italian art:
Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ; Caravaggio: A Life Sacred & Profane ; and Renaissance , the companion
book to the BBC TV series.
Tuscan painter Gentile da Fabriano (c 1370-1427) was in Venice during the early
stages of his transition to Renaissance realism, and his evolving style reputedly influenced
Venetian Antonio Vivarini (c 1415-80), the latter's Passion polyptych in Venice's Ca'
d'Oro radiating tremendous pathos. Antonio's brother, Bartolomeo Vivarini (c 1432-99)
created a delightful altarpiece in Venice's I Frari, in which a baby Jesus wriggles out of
the arms of his mother, squarely seated on her marble Renaissance throne.
In 1475, visiting Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina (c 1430-1479) introduced the
Venetians to oil paints. It would prove a perfect match, the Venetians' knack for layering
and blending colours creating a new luminosity that would ultimately redefine the city's
art. Among the early ground-breakers was Giovanni Bellini (c 1430-1516). The son of Ja-
copo Bellini, his Accademia Annunciation (1500) deployed glowing reds and ambers to
focus attention on the solitary figure of the kneeling Madonna, the angel Gabriel arriving
in a rush of geometrically rumpled drapery.
Bellini's prowess with the palette was not lost on his students, among them Giorgione
(1477-1510) and Titian (c 1488-1576). Giorgione preferred to paint from inspiration
without sketching out his subject first, as in his enigmatic, La Tempesta (The Storm;
1500), also in the Accademia. The younger Titian set himself apart with brushstrokes that
brought his subjects to life, from his early and measured St Mark Enthroned (1510) in
Venice's Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute to his thick, textured swansong Pietà (1576)
in the Accademia.
Titian raised the bar for a new generation of northern Italian masters, including Jacopo
Robusti, aka Tintoretto (1518-94). Occasionally enhancing his colours with finely
crushed glass, Tintoretto's action-packed biblical scenes read like a modern graphic novel.
His wall and ceiling paintings in Venice's Scuola Grande di San Rocco are nail-bitingly
spectacular, laced with holy superheroes, swooping angels, and deep, ominous shadows.
Paolo Caliari, aka Veronese (1528-88) was another 16th-century superstar, the remarkable
radiance of his hues captured in the Feast in the House of Levi (1573), another Accademia
must-see.