Opus Bartholomei
Montagna,
shows the unmistakable influence of Gentile Bellini. The same motif is found in the three musician angels in Montagna’s magnificent Madonna and Child, with St. Andrew, St. Monica, St. Ursula, and St. Sigismund, of 1498, in the Brera.
Montagna’s son, Benedetto (fl. 1500–1540), Giovanni Buonconsiglio (1470?–1536?), and Giovanni Speranza (1480–1536) also practised as painters; but Vicentine art from the middle of the sixteenth century has little claim on our attention.
THE SCHOOL OF VERCELLI
ONE of the earliest painters in this school was an obscure artist of the Old Lombard school named Martino Spanzotti. He was the master of Gaudenzio Ferrari (1471–1546), whose frescoes are easily recognisable by the crude colour, exuberant imagination, and forceful, almost brutal, realism which have caused him to be termed, somewhat loosely, the Rubens of Italy. A very late work by him is the St. Paul (No. 1285), which is signed and dated
1543
GAUDENTIUS.
Another of Spanzotti’s pupils was Sodoma, who was born at Vercelli in Piedmont, in 1477. He is best known for the large amount of work that he executed at Siena. This prolific artist, like a number of other painters of this unimportant school, is not represented in the Louvre. He died in 1551.
A faint echo of the teaching of Spanzotti may at times be detected in the works of Defendente Ferrari (fl. 1500–1535) and Girolamo Giovenone (fl. 1513–1527), who are not represented in the Louvre.
