Andrea Schiavone

(b ?Zara [now Zadar], ?c. 1510; d Venice, 1 Dec 1563). Dalmatian painter, draughtsman and etcher, active in Italy. He belonged to a prominent family who had settled in Zara but were originally from M?ldola in the Romagna. He may have been taught painting either in Zara or in Venice by Lorenzo Luzzo or Giovanni Pietro Luzzo, who were active in both cities. According to another theory, he was trained in the Venetian workshop of Bonifazio de' Pitati, but this would not account for his later proficiency as a fresco painter. As an etcher, he seems to have been essentially self-taught, working initially from drawings by Parmigianino. By the late 1530s Schiavone seems to have been established in Venice. In 1540 Giorgio Vasari commissioned from him a large battle painting (untraced), 'one of the best [works] that Andrea Schiavone ever did' (Vasari, 1568). Schiavone's first surviving paintings and etchings probably date from c. 1538-40; they show that he was strongly influenced by Parmigianino and central Italian Mannerists in figural and compositional modes, but was also a strikingly daring exponent of Venetian painterly techniques; he employed an equally free technique in etching. Several paintings, for example the large-scale Four Women in a Landscape (priv. col., see Richardson, fig. 14) and the small-scale Two Men (priv. col., see Richardson, fig. 23), carry his 'technique of spots, or sketches' (Vasari) so far that the subjects have not been identified.

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