, when he breaks away and sets out to paint by himself, is
crude and strong, but full of vital force. In his altarpiece of 1464,
in the Academy, he gives his saints reality by taking them off their
pedestals and making them stand upon the ground, and though they are
still isolated from one another in the partitions of an ancona, their
sparkling eyes, individual features, and curly beards give them a look
of life. The draperies, thin and clinging, with little rucked folds,
which display the forms, and the drawing of the bony structure,
exaggerated in the arms and legs, are Squarcionesque. The rocks and
stones, too, show the Paduan convention. In several of his other
altarpieces, Bartolommeo introduces rich ornaments and swags of fruit,
such as Donatello had first brought to Padua, or which Paduan artists
delighted to copy from classic columns. Antonio's manner to the end is
the local Venetian manner, infused as it was with the soft and charming
influence of Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello, but Bartolommeo adopts
the new and more ambitious style. Though not a very good painter, and
inclined to be puffy and shapeless in his flesh forms, he was the head
of a crowd of artists, and works of his school, signed _Opus factum_,
went all over Italy, and are found as far south as Bari. Works of his
pupils are numerous; the "St. Mark enthroned" in the Frari is as good if
not better than the master's own work, and the triptych in the Correr
Museum is a free imitation.

Round this early school gathered such painters as Antonio da Negroponte
and Quirizio da Murano, who were both working in 1450. Negroponte has
left an enthroned Madonna in S. Francesco della Vigna, which is one of
the most beautiful examples of colour and of the fanciful charm of the
Renaissance that the early art of Venice has to show. The Mother and
Child are placed in a marble shrine, adorned with antique reliefs, rich
wreaths of fruit swag above her head, a little Gothic loggia is full of
flowers and fruit, and birds are perched on cornucopias. On either
side, four badly drawn little angels, with ugly faces and awkwardly
foreshortened forms, foreshadow the beautiful, music-making angels which
became such a feature of North Italian art. The Divine Mother, adoring
the Child lying across her knees, has an exquisite, pensive face,
conceived with all the delicacy and simplicity of early art. It seems
quite possible, as Professor Leonello Venturi suggests, that we have