The Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Century

Going through the rooms of the splendid Palladian palace that houses the Civic Art Gallery, you can note the sixteenth-century fresco decorations by Domenico Brusasorzi (Sky Room and Hercules Room), Battista Zelotti (Room of the Council of the Gods), Eliodoro Forbicini (grotesque motifs) and Battista Franco (presumably the author of the monochrome frieze depicting the first bas-reliefs of the Trajan Column in Rome), embellished with white and gilt stucco by Bartolomeo Ridolfi.

These fine settings house paintings and sculptures – that arrived in the museum thanks above all to bequests and gifts by private citizens, as well as stored and purchased items – which are the expression of the history, taste and culture of the town and which, during the nineteenth century, formed what Ettore Arslan defined as ‘perhaps the finest gallery of paintings on the Veneto mainland’.

The Civic Art Gallery houses a number of rare and precious works of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. One of the most outstanding is the polyptych by Paolo Veneziano (Inv. A 157), one of the museum’s “rare pieces”, an authentic masterpiece of the history of Italian art. This extraordinary painting shows how, at that date, the Venetian painting tradition was an indispensable model for the emerging figurative art in Vicenza, which was establishing its own particular characteristics in the first local workshops, attracted also by the situation in Verona. An artist who especially distinguished himself in the most prestigious of those workshops, in the early fifteenth century, was Battista da Vicenza, a “painter characterised by his taste for narrating sacred subjects and stories to be read and by an immediate expressiveness” (Villa).

There are very few traces, either in painting or in sculpture, of the beginnings of Vicenza's artistic culture, which around the mid-fifteenth century began to look towards the nearby city of Padua. Local artists began to pick up the new proposals launched by Paduan artistic tradition in the years between 1450 and 1470, thus leaving behind the International Gothic style and at the same time being fascinated by the innovations of fifteenth-century Flemish painting (documented in the museum by the work by Hans Memling, Inv. A 297).

This laid the foundations for the birth and consolidation, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, of the ‘great Vicenza school’, of which Bartolomeo Montagna was an exquisite exponent.