The late Fifteenth and the Sixteenth Century

In the years between 1480 and 1520 there were extraordinary and unexpected developments in painting in Vicenza, reaching their highest expression in the monumental altar pieces of the church of San Bartolomeo, now housed in the Civic Art Gallery. These grandiose paintings, along with a few other precious works of art, were miraculously saved after the church and the adjoining convent were violated between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, transformed into hospitals, then razed to the ground in 1838. They are real masterpieces by the same artists – Bartolomeo Montagna, Giovanni Bonconsiglio, Giovanni Speranza de’ Vajenti, Giambattista Cima da Conegliano and Marcello Fogolino – who were to become the prominent figures of Renaissance painting in Vicenza, inaugurated by Montagna himself.

From the second half of the fifteenth century and during the sixteenth, there was therefore a gradual consolidation of the distinctive features of local figurative culture, which was constantly open to innovations and suggestions, especially from Venice. It was in the city on the lagoon, where the greatest exponents of sixteenth-century Veneto painting (Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese) were at work, that the so-called “revolution of light” began in the field of painting, from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards. Artists in fact began to model formsusing chiaroscuro and bringing together clashing colours. The works of Tintoretto and Veronese in the Museum clearly show how light was the real protagonist of painting in that period.

Light effects also played an extremely important role in the masterpieces of the goldsmith from Vicenza, Valerio Belli, “sculptor of light”: the rock crystals on which he engraved sacred episodes, kept in the Museum (Inv. AP I 3; AP I 4), are “absolute points of arrival in the art of engraving” (Villa).

The collection in Palazzo Chiericati also includes sculptures of fine quality dating back to the sixteenth century, such as the Half-bust portrait of Vincenzo Pellegrini (Inv. S 182) sculpted in marble by Alessandro Vittoria and the refined terracotta depicting the Madonna and Child (Inv. S 269) by JacopoSansovino.