Saint Clare

Bartolomeo Vivarini's Saint Clare of 1451, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, is an early work by the Murano-born painter who, with his brother Antonio, founded one of the most productive altarpiece workshops in fifteenth-century Venice. Saint Clare, founder of the Order of Poor Ladies, is depicted with the monstrance she carried in legendary acts of intercession — in the isolated devotional image format typical of the Vivarini workshop for individual saint panels. The 1451 date places this among the earliest examples of the workshop's production, at a moment when Venice was absorbing North Italian and Flemish influences into its distinctive pictorial tradition.

The panel demonstrates the Vivarini workshop's characteristic combination of International Gothic decorative elements — the elaborately tooled gold ground and ornamental halo — with the more volumetric figure modelling being introduced from North Italian sources. The saint's robe is handled with flat areas of colour rather than complex drapery folds, giving the figure an archaic, hieratic presence.