rst been mentioned in the seventeenth century by
Boschini, and perhaps given him by that writer himself. He was a son of
the mountains, who, though he came early to Venice, and lived there most
of his life, never loses something of their wild freshness, and to the
end delights in bringing them into his backgrounds. He lived with his
mother at Conegliano, the beautiful town of the Trevisan marches, until
1484, when he was twenty-five, and then came down to Vicenza, where he
fell under the tuition of Bartolommeo Montagna, a Vicentine painter, who
had been studying both with Alvise and Bellini. Cima's "Madonna with
Saints," painted for the Church of St. Bartolommeo, Vicenza, in 1489,
shows him still using the old method of tempera, in a careful, cold,
painstaking style, yet already showing his own taste. The composition
has something of Alvise, yet that something has been learned through
the agency of Montagna, for the figures have the latter's severity
and austere character and the colour is clearer and more crude than
Alvise's. It is no light resemblance, and he must have been long with
Montagna. In the type of the Christ in Montagna's Pieta at Monte Berico,
in the fondness for airy porticoes, in the architecture and main
features of his "Madonna enthroned" in the Museo Civico at Vicenza, we
see characteristics which Cima followed, though he interpreted them in
his own way. He turns the heavy arches and domes that Alvise loved, into
airy pergolas, decked with vines. He gives increasing importance to high
skies and to atmospheric distances. When he got to Venice in 1492, he
began to paint in oils, and undertook the panel of S. John Baptist with
attendant saints, still in the Church of S. Madonna dell' Orto. The
work of this is rather angular and tentative, but true and fresh, and
he comes to his best soon after, in the "Baptism" in S. Giovanni in
Bragora, which Bellini, sixteen years later, paid him the compliment
of copying. It was quite unusual to choose such a subject for the High
Altar, and could only be justified by devotion to the Baptist, who was
Cima's own name-saint as well as that of the Church. Cima is here at his
very highest; the composition is not derived from any one else, but is
all the conception of an ingenuous soul, full of intuition and insight.
The Christ is particularly fine and simple, unexaggerated in pose and
type; the arm of the Baptist is too long, but the very fault serves to
give him a refined,