(b Orzinuovi, nr Brescia, or Biron, nr Vicenza, c. 1450; d Vicenza, 11 Oct 1523). Painter and draughtsman.
Montagna is first documented in 1459 in Vicenza as a minor and, still a minor, in 1467. In 1469 he is recorded as a resident of Venice. In 1474 he was living in Vicenza where, in 1476 and 1478, he was commissioned to paint altarpieces (now lost). He has variously been considered a pupil of Andrea Mantegna (Vasari), Giovanni Bellini, Antonello da Messina, Alvise Vivarini, Domenico Morone and Vittore Carpaccio. While none of these artists, except Carpaccio, was irrelevant to Montagna's stylistic formation, scholars agree that Giovanni Bellini was the primary influence on his art. He may have worked in Bellini's shop around 1470. Several of Montagna's paintings of the Virgin and Child in which the influence of Antonello da Messina is especially marked (e.g. two in Belluno, Mus. Civ.; London, N.G., see Davies, no. 802) are likely to be close in date to Antonello's sojourn in Venice (1475-6); they are therefore best considered Montagna's earliest extant works (Gilbert, 1967) rather than as an unexplained parenthesis around 1485 between two Bellinesque phases (Puppi, 1962). These early paintings appear to be followed by others in which the geometrically rounded forms derived from Antonello become more slender and sharper-edged. Their figures are imbued with a deeply felt, individual humanity, sometimes austere and minatory, sometimes tender. Among them are some larger-scale works, for example the Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS Nicholas and Lucy (Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.) and a Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS Ansanus, Anthony Abbot, Francis and Jerome (often but wrongly attributed to Carpaccio; Vicenza, Mus. Civ. A. & Stor.). This group also includes a fresco fragment depicting the Virgin and Child (London, N.G.), the modern frame of which is inscribed, 'Painted 1481 in the choir of the church of Magr? near Schio-Vicenza'. The date seems plausible on stylistic grounds, and the work thus provides a chronological point of reference for the rest of the group. In 1482, again in Venice, Montagna undertook to paint canvases of the Flood and the Creation for the Scuola di S Marco; the former was completed in 1485-6 by Benedetto Diana, and both were subsequently destroyed by fire.
Part of the
See the Abbreviations for further details.
