Vivarini, Antonio

▪ Italian painter

born c. 1415, , Murano?, Republic of Venice [Italy]

died c. 1480

      painter, one of the most important and prolific Venetian artists of the first half of the 15th century, founder of the studio of the influential Vivarini family of painters.

      From 1444 Vivarini collaborated with his brother-in-law Giovanni d'Alemagna (d. 1450); later he worked with his younger brother, Bartolomeo. Surviving altarpieces executed by Antonio and Giovanni d'Alemagna 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, Milan (1448). 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 the Church of the Eremitani (destroyed in World War II).

      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 Vivarini 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.

* * *