Pietro della Vecchia in Dalmatia

Sa？etak The author has brought to light three paintings of the Venetian master, Pietro della Vecchia (Vicenza ?, 1602/1603-Venice, 1678), commissioned in Dalmatia. The altarpiece Madonna with the Child, and St. John the Baptist, St. Roch and the Holy Father is housed at the church of St. John in Ka？tel Luk？i？, near Split, while the small panel Christ Embracing St. Francis served as a tabernacle door on the altar of the Trogir Cathedral. The parish church of Blato (the chapel of St.Vicenza, Kor？ula), possesses a large altarpiece representing St.Anthony of Padua and his miracles. All the three paintings with accentuated anxiety and bizarreness could be dated around 1640. The painting from Ka？tel Luk？i？ stands out as the most archaic, in all likelihood originating in the early 1640s, while the other two paintings are of a more recent date. These paintings reveal Pietro della Vecchia as a distinctive follower of sixteenth-century Venetian painting, under the strong influence of Giorgione. Balanced and simple composition, musical rhythm of the movement, drapery flows, absorbed and idyllic mood of a pastoral landscape are so typically Giorgione’s. Yet the artist does not blindly follow the masters, but attempts to reinterpret them. The profound devotion of his figures bears the spirit of Counter-Reformation and the influence of the work of Bernardo Strozzi, while the tense tranquility is related to the followers of Caravaggio seen from the Venetian perspective. Particular attention should be drawn to the grotesquely exaggerated character representation: the tense and shivering St. Francis in Trogir or clusters of ghost-like figures in the background of the Kor？ula altarpiece. This combination of Arcadian and grotesque mood is the main feature of Pietro della Vecchia’s painting, clearly linking him to the artistic postulates of Sebastiano Mazzoni and Francesco Maffei