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Andrea Meldolla (Zara, c. 1510/1515 - 1563) was an Italian Renaissance etcher and painter, active mainly in Venice.

Biography

Meldolla was the son of a garrison commander of a post near Zara, then a colonial outpost of the Republic of Venice in Dalmatia (corresponding today to Zadar, Croatia). He was also called Schiavone (the Slavonian). The painters family came from a small town Meldolla close to the city of Forli in Romagna. According to the Grove Dictionary of Art, Meldolla was born in Zara in Dalmatia and trained either in Zara or in Venice. He worked in fresco, panel painting, and etching (teaching himself to etch by working initially from drawings by Parmigianino). By 1540, he was well enough established in Venice that Giorgio Vasari commissioned him a large battle picture (which the Florentine author mentions in his Lives). Although initially much influenced by Parmigianino and Italian Mannerism, "he was also a strikingly daring exponent of Venetian painting techniques", and ultimately combined both in his works, influencing Titian, Tintoretto, and Jacopo Bassano among others. His works "shocked some contemporaries and stimulated others". By the 1550s, he had achieved a new synthesis of Raphael and Titian's compositional elements with his own interest in atmosphere, effecting a "fusion of form with a dense atmosphere in a pictorial fabric whose elements tend to lose their separate indenties".

Freedburg finds "Andrea Meldolla called Schiavone" much more adapted to the Mannerist vocabulary, comments that Lomazzo had once asserted, mistakenly, that he was a pupil of Parmigianino. There are unproven claims that he trained with Bonifazio de Pitati. Freedberg finds that while he was "able to invent a Venetian Maniera...he was strangely uncreative in the more ordinary workings of artistic invention." Later in the 1550s, "occasionally, the sensibility- too receptive, almost feminine - that inclined Schiavone towards imitation brought him to the verge of echo of (Titian)".

Richardson also insists on his importance as an etcher: "In etching he was similarly innovative. His technique was unlike that of any contemporary: unsystematically he used dense webs of light, fine, multidirectional hatching to create a tonal continuum embracing form, light, shadow, and air. His etcings are the only real equivalent in printmaking of later 16th-century Venetian painting modes, and his technical experiments were emulated by 17th-century etchers such as Jacques Bellange, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Rembrandt".

Meldolla died in Venice.

Reference

• Francis E. Richardson, Andrea Schiavone (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1980);
• Francis E, Richardson, in the Encyclopedia of Italian Renaissance & Mannerist Art, 2: pp. 1502-04 at 1503
• Freedberg, Sydney J. (1993). Pelican History of Art (ed.). Painting in Italy, 1500-1600. Penguin Books Ltd. pp. 533–4.

External links

• Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery - Biography of Andrea Schiavone
• The Oxford Dictionary of Art - Andrea Schiavone
• Encyclopaedia Britannica - Andrea Meldolla
• British Journal of Aesthetics - Andrea Meldolla
• Image Base and Biography - Andrea Schiavone (Andrea Meldolla)
• Mannerist painters in Florence and Rome

• 1510s deaths
• 1563 deaths
• Italian natives of former Yugoslavia
• Renaissance painters
• Italian painters