ed places. His exquisite surface and finish and his
marked originality make him a difficult master to imitate with any
success. His latest work is dated 1508, but Ridolfi says he lived till
1517, and it seems probable that he returned to his beloved Conegliano
and there passed his last years.

If Cima possessed originality, Vincenzo of Treviso, called Catena,
gained an immense reputation by his industry and his power of imitating
and adopting the manner of Bellini's School. In those days men did not
trouble themselves much as to whether they were original or not. They
worked away on traditional compositions, frankly introducing figures
from their master's cartoons, modifying a type here, making some little
experiment or arrangement there, and, as a French critic puts it,
leaving their own personality to "hatch out" in due time, if it existed,
and when it was sufficiently ripened by real mastery of their art. It is
here that Catena fails; beginning as a journeyman in the Sala del Gran
Consiglio, at a salary of three ducats a month, he for long failed to
acquire the absolute mastery of drawing which was possessed by the
better disciples of the schools. But he is painstaking, determined to
get on, and eager to satisfy the continually increasing demand for work.
His draperies are confused and unmeaning, his faces round, with small
features, inexpressive button mouths, and weak chins, and his flesh
tints have little of the glow which is later the prerogative of every
second-rate painter. Yet Catena succeeds, like many another careful
mediocre man, in securing patronage, and as the sixteenth century opened
he gained the distinction from Doge Loredano of a commission to paint
the altarpiece for the Pregadi Chapel of the Sala di Tre, in the Ducal
Palace. He adapts his group from that of Bellini in the Cathedral of
Murano, bringing in a profile portrait of the kneeling Doge, of which he
afterwards made numerous copies, one of which was for long assigned to
Gentile and one to Giovanni Bellini.

That Catena is not without charm, we discern in such a composition as
his "Martyrdom of St. Cristina," in S. Maria Mater Domini, in which the
saint, a solid, Bellinesque figure, kneels upon the water, in which she
met her death, and is surrounded by little angels, holding up the
millstone tied round her neck, and laden with other instruments of her
martyrdom. Catena borrows right and left, and tries to follow every new
indication of conte