CARPACCIO,

See also:

• VITTORIO

VITTORIO, or VITTORE (c. 1465-c. 1522)  , Italian painter, was born in Venice, cf an old Venetian family . 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 R . H .

Cust (1907) ; and the

criticism by Roger Fry, A Genre Painter and his Critics," in the Quarterly Review (London, April 1908) .