Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460–1525/6) was a Venetian painter who studied
under Gentile Bellini. He is best known for a 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 an early Venetian masters. The date
of his birth is conjectural. He is first mentioned in 1472in 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.
Other works include the Ten thousand martyrs of Mount Ararat.
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).
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article "Italian Renaissance".