Polyptych with Saint James Major, Madonna and Child, and Saints

The Polyptych with Saint James Major, Madonna and Child, and Saints of around 1490, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, is among Bartolomeo Vivarini's most substantial surviving altarpiece works from his late period. The polyptych format — multiple panels with a central Madonna and flanking saints — was the dominant vehicle for altarpiece production in the Veneto throughout the fifteenth century, and the Vivarini workshop was its most prolific producer. By the 1490s, however, the unified single-panel altarpiece was becoming fashionable under Bellini's influence, and this polyptych represents a late-career continuation of an older format.

The spatial coordination across multiple polyptych panels — maintaining consistent light direction, scale relationships, and spatial logic while working in physically separate panel sections — required systematic workshop planning. The individual figures retain the crisp contour and detailed surface treatment characteristic of Bartolomeo's career while the overall tonal organisation reflects late-fifteenth-century developments.