Antonio Vivarini

Antonio Vivarini (born c. 1415, Murano?, Republic of Venice [Italy]—died c. 1480) was a painter who was one of the most important and prolific Venetian artists of the first half of the 15th century and founder of the studio of the influential Vivarini family of painters. He was one of the first Venetian painters to utilize Renaissance style.

Vivarini’s first signed work was an altarpiece executed for the Basilica Eufrasiana di Parenzo (now in Poreč, Croatia) in 1440; it contained both the Venetian Gothic and Renaissance elements that would characterize much of his work. From 1444 he collaborated with his brother-in-law Giovanni d’Alemagna. Surviving altarpieces executed by Antonio and Giovanni are in the churches of San Zaccaria (1443–44) and San Pantalon (1444) and in the Accademia (1446), all in Venice; and a polyptych is in the Brera in Milan (1448). One of their most important joint commissions was the three altars for the Church of San Zaccaria, in which their depictions of saints appear to be three-dimensional—unusual for the time. Antonio and Giovanni also painted the Coronation of the Virgin for the Church of San Pantalon. Between 1447 and 1450 the two artists lived in Padua, where, together with Andrea Mantegna and Niccolò Pizzolo, they executed a cycle of frescoes in the Ovetari Chapel of Eremitani Church (destroyed in World War II).

After Giovanni’s death in 1450, Antonio abandoned both his work on Eremitani Church, which was never completed, and the city of Padua in order to work with his younger brother, Bartolomeo, in Venice. The styles of Antonio and Giovanni are not easily distinguished, but Antonio was certainly the dominant partner. The soft, rounded figures in his heavily ornamented polyptychs are influenced by Gentile da Fabriano and, more superficially, by Masolino. The earliest work signed by Antonio and Bartolomeo is a polyptych, now in the Bologna gallery, commissioned by Pope Nicholas V in 1450. It is couched in the same idiom as the paintings of Antonio’s first period, but, in later works, the intervention of his more progressive younger brother resulted in the introduction of Renaissance elements into Antonio’s style.

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In addition to his collaborations with Giovanni and Bartolomeo, Antonio completed many independent projects. These included altarpieces for the Benedictine abbey of Praglia (c. 1448) as well as the large-scale St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Ursula and Her Virgins (c. 1450s) for a church in Brescia. Antonio continued to produce altarpieces into the late 1460s, including his last signed piece, the polyptych for San Maria Vetere in Andria (1467).