CIMA da Conegliano

In addition to the adoring shepherds, St Catherine, St Helen, as well as Tobit and the Archangel Raphael are represented in the scene.

Background scene: shepherd and shepherd boy were in the countryside with their dog and their flock. The shepherd was leaning on a tree playing his pipes while the boy dozed at his feet. When their peace was disturbed and their attention caught, they followed the path to the great event, between the manger and the cross (foreground scene).

This painting is considered Cima’s masterpiece and provided a model for Giovanni Bellini’s painting, some years later, of the same subject for the church of Santa Corona in Vicenza. It was this painting that made Cima’s reputation among painters and the general public in Venice.

In the background, groups of easterners appear to be making their way to the City of God on horseback or on foot. John waits in readiness on the plain.

The attribution to Cima is doubtful, it is perhaps a work by one Cima’s follower, Giovanni da Udine.

The subject of the painting is extremely unusual in Italian Renaissance painting. It was probably painted for a private patron with a special interest in the subject.

Jonathan was the son of Saul, king of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, and David was the son of Jesse of Bethlehem and Jonathan’s presumed rival for the crown. David eventually becomes king. The friendship between David and Jonathan was a covenantal relationship. The traditional and mainstream religious interpretation of the relationship has been one of platonic love and an example of homosociality. Some later Medieval and Renaissance literature drew upon the story to underline strong personal friendships between men.

Even after Giorgione had introduced his revolutionary tonal reform, Giambattista Cima continued with his own lines of expression - his figures statue-like in their firmness and his colours richly limpid. These are the qualities we find in works of his that date from the first decade of the sixteenth century, works like the Incredulity of St Thomas and Bishop Magno for example, which was painted for the Guild headquarters of the Stone-masons at S. Samuele. Spaced with perfect harmony amid the sharp interplay of light and shade, the figures of Christ, of the Apostle and the saint stand statue-like and monumental against the perfectly matching marble slabs of a niche which seems to have been conjured into existence in the dreamy beauty of the countryside of the Veneto. Human figures, architecture and countryside all partake of the same sublime, formal heightening, images of an uncorrupted and incorruptible world, of a timeless, mythically serene present.

There is no really reliable information concerning the formation and early activity of this painter, who was to a large extent responsible for the spread of the artistic culture of Venice throughout Venetian territory. This painting, probably a late work, is characterized by its serenity and balance and its extraordinary formal and expressive composure.

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Paying pictorial homage to a new architectural grandeur, this later fifteenth-century Sacra Conversazione followed one painted by Antonello da Messina for San Cassiano. The altarpiece was installed in the sacristy of San Michele in Isola on Murano. Sts Peter, Romuald, Benedict, and Paul are seen from left to right, standing below a mock-mosaic cupola, with open skies glimpsed behind them and the Mother and Child. Continued by Giorgione, with fewer saints, in the Castelfranco Madonna, such compositions remained alive and well in Venetian art in the sixteenth century.

This altarpiece originated in the Carità Church in Venice, where it rested above a marble altar installed in 1495. Very likely, as in other Venetian works of this period, Cima made his trompe-l’oeil architectural space consistent with the real environment, so that the painted columns would have appeared to continue the marble ones.

Cima had been inspired by Giovanni Bellini’s St Giobbe Altarpiece. The represented saints are Catherine, George, Nicholas, Anthony Abbot, Sebastian and Lucy.

The greatest of the admirers of Antonello da Messina was Giambattista Cima da Conegliano who maintained the poetic purity of his predecessor’s language which was characterized by groups of figures restfully disposed, by the purity of his line, by the airy clarity of his light and by the Spring-like freshness of his colour. Amongst the very finest works in all Cima’s serenely poetic output was the ‘Madonna of the Orange Tree’, originally placed in the Church of Santa Chiara on Murano.

With trusting simplicity, the Virgin, seated on an outcrop of rock before the beautiful orange tree, offers the Child to the adoration of St Louis of France and St Jerome whilst in the background St Joseph looks after the ass which has carried the Holy Family to this secluded spot which bears all the signs of having been based on the gently rolling foothills of the Alps in the Veneto. Through the transfiguring strength of the light, which is as if filtered through the clearest of crystal, the idyllic serenity of the countryside and of the sentiments achieves a supreme integrity of expression.

This painting represents one of the most felicitous moments in the career of the artist.

This painting is probably a fragment of a larger altarpiece.

The subject is the mother of the Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great, who adopted Christianity in 313 A.D. According to legend, she found in the Holy Land the True Cross on which Christ was crucified. Cima, a close follower of Giovanni Bellini, worked for most of his career in the Alpine region north of Venice. In the background of this perfectly preserved panel there is a landscape of the region near the artist’s birthplace, Conegliano.

Stained glass, although common in France and Germany, rare in Italy. However, the right transept of the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo possesses one of the most important set of Renaissance stained glass windows. Made and installed in the course of half a century (between about 1470 and 1520), the windows exalt the wisdom and faith of the Dominican order. A number of illustrious artists provided the cartoons to which the windows were made. Cima da Conegliano is credited with the figure of St John.

St John the Baptist is depicted with Sts Peter, Mark, Jerome, and Paul.

The elegant painted architecture is a continuation of the real structure of the panel. The Baptist, in the centre, emphasizes the vertical axis around which the whole scene is organized, with pair of saints arranged symmetrically at the sides.

The painting comes from the monastery of Santa Maria Mater Domini at Conegliano.

The painting is from the church of Corpus Domini in Venice. It was commissioned by Benedetto Carloni in his woill of November 5, 1504. It is signed in Latin on the paper on the base: “JOANIS BAPTISTA CIMA / CONEGLIAN(ENS)IS.”

Cima must have been attracted at a very early age to Venice, where he was fascinated by the elder Bellini and Antonello da Messina. From them he acquired a pictorial repertory suited to his work on a provincial circuit, and like Montagna and Alvise Vivarini, he propagated their approach to painting on the mainland and in Emilia. His work, however, has richer colour and warmth, through the influence of Giorgione.

This altarpiece shows Cima’s typical mixture of the archaic and the modern. The impeccably harmonious fifteenth-century construction of architecture and figures is accompanied by a modern sunny atmosphere and a landscape steeped in luminous vapour. The traveling artist has evoked memories of his birthplace, setting it on the shores of a quiet lake and peopling it with shepherds, as in an Arcadian dream.

In the illusory space skillfully created by perspective, the divine light that, by medieval tradition, accompanied the Archangel Gabriel as he brought the news of Christ’s conception seems real. We do not immediately notice that this source - and not the sun - illuminates the messenger. A rush of air bursts into the room with him, fluttering his robe, hair, and even the parchment that carries a list of those who commissioned the work as well as the artist’s signature.

The painting is signed and dated on the parchment set on the step of the bed. Due to restorations the colours are considerably faded.

Close to, and trading with, the Near East, Venice was often the point of departure for crusaders. Many mercantile colonies from Egypt and Turkey were also settled in Venice, so Venetian artists knew the garb of all these lands. his can be seen in the Healing of Anianus, an unusually strong panel by Cima da Conegliano, later enlarged at top and bottom. Undated, this large work was one of four for the chapel of the Lucchese silk weavers, located in the Venetian church of Santa Maria dei Crocicchieri (Crusaders).

The painting is from the church of the Convent of San Domenico, Parma. The model of the Sacred Conversation, developed in the 1470s by Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina, and which Cima da Conegliano borrows here, became widely used outside the Veneto, reaching Emilia and Romagna, and continued until the early sixteenth century.

This painting is probably a fragment of the front panel of a cassone. The source of the scene is Ovid.

This painting is probably a fragment of the front panel of a cassone. The source of the scene is Ovid.

The painting, bearing a later a forged signature by Marco Basaiti, was executed in the workshop of Cima da Conegliano. It is a subsequent version of a painting of the workshop now in the Harewood Collection in Yorkshire.

According to an apocryphal life of Mary, her parents, Anna and Joachim, were not blessed with child for twenty years and when at last their daughter Miriam or Mary was born, they were so grateful to the Lord that they gave her into the care of the church and she became a virgin of the temple. These maidens were educated and received moral instruction from the priests, an arrangement which to some extent foreshadowed the orders of nuns in the Middle Ages.

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