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Vittore Carpaccio
Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460–1525/6) was a
Venetian painter who studied under Gentile Bellini. He is best known
for the cycle of nine paintings The Legend of Saint Ursula.
The facts of his life are obscure, but his principal
works were executed between 1490 and 1519; and he ranks as one of
the finest precursors of the great Venetian masters. The date of
his birth is conjectural. He is first mentioned in 1472 in a will
of his uncle Fra Ilario, and Dr Ludwig infers from this that he
was born c. 1455, on the ground that no one could enter into an
inheritance under the age of fifteen; but the inference ignores
the possibility of a testator making his will in prospect of the
beneficiary attaining his legal age.
Consideration of the youthful style of his earliest
dated pictures ("St Ursula" series, Venice, 1490) makes
it improbable that at that time he had reached so mature an age
as thirty-five; and the date of his birth is more probably to be
guessed from his being about twenty-five in 1490.
What is certain is that he was a pupil (not, as
sometimes thought, the master) of Lazzaro Bastiani, who, like the
Bellini and Vivarini, was the head of a large atelier in Venice,
and whose own work is seen in such pictures as the "S. Veneranda"
at Vienna, and the "Doge Mocenigo kneeling before the Virgin"
and "Madonna and Child" (formerly attributed to Carpaccio)
in the National Gallery, London.
In later years Carpaccio appears to have been influenced
by Cima da Conegliano (e.g. in the "Death of the Virgin,"
1508, at Ferrara). Apart from the "St Ursula" series,
his scattered series of the "Life of the Virgin" and "Life
of St Stephen," and a "Dead Christ" at Berlin, may
be specially mentioned.
For an authoritative and detailed account, see
the Life and Works of Vittorio Carpaccio, by Pompeo Molmenti and
Gustav Ludwig, Eng. trans. by RH Cust (1907); and the criticism
by Roger Fry, "A Genre Painter and his Critics," in the
Quarterly Review (London, April 1908).
The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes
that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the
world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even
draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend
to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces
can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from
the existing paintings.h
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