The work of Bartolomeo Veneto is documented by a series of signed and dated paintings, but verified archival sources that might give more information about his life are lacking. The earliest of his surviving paintings attested to by an inscription is a depiction of the Madonna dated 9 April 1502 and signed "bartolomio mezo venizian e mezo cremonexe". This painting, from a Venetian collection, was auctioned at Sotheby's in London on 9 December 1959; its present whereabouts are unknown. The formulation of the inscription on this Madonna painting could indicate the painter's possible origin in Cremona. On one of his next signed and dated works, the 'Circumcision of Christ' in the Louvre, from 1506, the painter signed his name in the form he would mainly use from that point on: "bartholomeus da venetia". In their depiction of the Madonna, both of these works employ a pictorial invention developed in the Bellini circle. In fact, in the inscription on another Madonna panel dated 7 April 150(9?), the painter described himself as a pupil of Gentile Bellini (the painting was formerly in the Ercolani Collection in Bologna, and is presumably now in the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio). Bartolomeo Veneto may have been the first of the Bellini circle to come into contact with German art, especially that of Albrecht Dürer, which would henceforth influence his own style. In addition to general stylistic borrowings, it can occasionally be seen in details that he used prints by Dürer and Lucas van Leyden as models. The suggestion by A. Venturi that between 1505 and 1508 the artist worked at the court of Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara appears to be mistaken, for an artist by this name is already documented there in 1473 (see L. Pagnotta 1993, 1997). By the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century the painter appears to have left Venice and worked in various places in northern Italy, including Brescia and Milan; his contact with works by Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo Lotto and Andrea Previtali, as well as Moretto and Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo later on, had a lasting influence on his own work. Whether Bartolomeo Veneto is the painter of that name who died in Turin in 1531 remains uncertain.
