_Alvise Vivarini_ (Venetian, painted 1461-1503).
All visitors to Venice are familiar with a picture, in the
church of the Redentore, of the Madonna and Sleeping Child,
with two playing angels; there is a bird on the curtain above,
and some fruit on the parapet below. It is one of the most
charming little pictures in Venice, and is usually shown as a
work of Giovanni Bellini. Modern criticism assigns it, however,
to Alvise Vivarini, to whom an important place in the history
of Venetian painting is now accorded as an artist developing on
lines independent of the Bellinis, and as the Master of Lorenzo
Lotto.[255] That he was largely employed in the Ducal Palace
we know from Vasari, who describes his works there, commending
more particularly their fine perspective and "portraits from
the life so well depicted as to prove that this master copied
nature very faithfully." These works, begun in 1489 and stopped
by the artist's death in 1503, were destroyed in the fire of
1577. Of his extant works, the earliest one, which is dated
(1475), is at Montefiorentino. The altar-piece in the Venice
Academy is dated 1480, and that in the Berlin Gallery is
probably of the same period. To a later date are assigned the
Madonnas of the Redentore and S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice,
and the present picture. His latest work, finished after his
death by Marco Basaiti, is the large altar-piece of St. Ambrose
in the Frari.
This picture (which is signed on a cartellino on the parapet) is, says
Mr. Berenson, "delightful as a composition. The Madonna is seen down
to the waist, holding the Child on a parapet, while behind her, to
the left, a window opens out on a charming landscape. The Madonna's
face has a tinge of almost Botticellian melancholy, as in Lotto's
Recanati altarpiece. The Child is almost the _putto_ on the right in
the Redentore picture, but somewhat more bony. The draperies already
have the freedom of Alvise's latest works." The picture, formerly in
the Manfrini Gallery, was presented by Mr. Charles Loeser in 1898.