Vittore Carpaccio
Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1465 – 1525/1526), was a painter of the Republic of Venice. Carpaccio was trained in the Venetian pictorial tradition of the Bellinis, the Vivarinis, as well as other influential figures such as Antonello da Messina and Dürer. The result was an original and independent personality, particularly attracted by the details of flora, fauna and landscape, architecture, furniture and decoration, clothing and exoticism. All composed with an inspiration that ranges from the playful to the theatrical, from anecdote to satire, but which reaches a supreme artistic height. He was one of the protagonists of the production of canvases in Venice between the 15th and 16th centuries, becoming perhaps the best witness of the life and customs of the Serenissima of those years.
Thanks to these multiple registers, Carpaccio was above all an unsurpassed storyteller and one of the inventors of European genre painting. He is celebrated above all for his cycles, linked series of canvases that convey sacred stories, with an eloquent visual narrative, created for the meeting rooms of the Venetian Scuole. These are fundamental works by Carpaccio, some of which remained in Venice, but others were transferred, at the beginning of the 19th century, to Italian and foreign museums. The only cycle that remains in its original location is that of the Dalmatian School of Saints Giorgio and Trifone, known as Schiavoni.
Like other great Italian masters of his generation, after a period of great success, shortly after the beginning of the 16th century he experienced a crisis due to difficulties in assimilating the revolutionary and modern contributions of the new painters (Raphael, Giorgione and Titian). He lived his last years relegated to the provinces, where his late style still found admirers.