Vincenzo Catena: A Study of the Venetian Painter. By Giles
Robertson. With cata- logue raisonne and plates. (Edinburgh University Press. 35s.) THE Venetian painter Vincenzo Catena (1470-1531) is known to lovers of the Giorgionesque by his 'Warrior adoring the Infant Christ' in the National Gallery and through Mr. Berenson's glowing lines on this very masterpiece. He has now received his scientific monograph, wherein his stature and his constellation in the art-historical universe have been established. Mr. Robertson's book is a model of what Mr. Berenson termed the Teutonic approach to art. It is learned and thorough to the extreme, but only rarely allows itself to rise above the tangle of derivations to a line here and there of winged evaluation. Catena is here represented as an eclectic, deriving from Bellini and Cima cia Conegliano, in whose style he continues to paint formal altarpieces until and far beyond his connection with Giorgione, which is of 1506. Then slowly his linear style, his cool colouring, are transformed into the softer modelling, the warmer hues of the Master of Castelfranco. He may have met Giorgione in the humanist circles to which both belonged and Mr. Robertson's documents prove that Catena had contacts with Bembo, Guidic- cione the poet, and Marcantonio Michiel as well as other members of Venetian humanism.
In spite of his early association with Giorgione, Catena's work does not show any great traces of this master's style and spirit before 1520, when he paints his indubitable masterpiece, the St. Christina of Santa Maria Mater Domini. This, the 'Judith' and the 'Warrior adoring' are works which establish Catena's rank as one of the principal bearers of the poetry of Giorgione. Writing of the 'boy-angels who come to the aid of St. Christina, the author justly aban- dons the scientific for the poetic: 'They are of the family which plays and sings about the steps in the altarpieces of Bellini and Carpaccio, but only here are they brought to play an active part in the scene. They remind one irresistibly of the Three Boys in Mozart's Magic Flute, saving Pamina from suicide.' In the St. Christina as in the 'Warrior adoring' Titian's influence becomes apparent, and in the latter painting the author perceives a perfect fusion of the Bellinesque with the Titianesque.
Catena, then, was an eclectic. But he was also an accomplished individual artist, endowed with a personal vision, in which the old and the new were blended. His vision was large, precise, geometrical, maintaining 'the clarity and intellectual order' of the Quattrocento far into the age of Titian and the approaching Baroque.
So much emerges from Mr. Robertson's meticulous analysis of forty-nine works listed in the catalogue raisonne. A dilet- tante, a man of property, but also an associate of the intellectual and artistic elite of Venice, open to all the fructifying influences of the Bellini workshop down to Palma and to Titian—Catena stands out as a man of the transition, a painter of sacr.e con- versazione, of fine Venetian portraits, of genre, and in the end an inventor of designs that are at once noble, calm, dignified and poetic.
F. M. G.
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