Alvise Vivarini
Republic of Venice · Renaissance, Venetian painting
The story
By the 1480s one family had been painting altarpieces in Venice for three generations. Alvise Vivarini was the last of them: son of Antonio, nephew and probably pupil of Bartolomeo, heir to a workshop on the glassmaking island of Murano.
He could have simply carried on the family's hard, linear style. Instead he watched what Giovanni Bellini and the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina were doing with soft light and oil paint, and he loosened his own manner to keep up. For a while the Vivarini shop was the main rival to Bellini's in the city.
The rivalry ended in an odd partnership. In 1488 Alvise asked the Venetian state for a share in the great commission to decorate the hall of the Great Council in the Doge's Palace, and he and Bellini were appointed to work on it together. Alvise died around 1505 with his part unfinished, which left Bellini, and later the young Titian, to carry the project on.
His signed altarpieces still hang in Venetian churches and in museums from Vienna to Madrid, calm rows of saints under his own clear light.
