Enciclopedia Cattolica

GUARIENTO PADOVANO

Volume VI · p. 722 · 1951

English translation · Testo originale italiano

GUARIENTO PADOVANO. - Pittore, figlio di Arpo, è documentato a Padova dal 1338 al 1365; nel 1365 è chiamato a Venezia per gli affreschi in Palazzo Ducale; è già morto nel sett. 1370.
GUARIENTO PADOVANO. - Pittore, figlio di Arpo, è documentato a Padova dal 1338 al 1365; nel 1365 è chiamato a Venezia per gli affreschi in Palazzo Ducale; è già morto nel sett. 1370.

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

GUARIENTO PADOVANO. — Painter, son of Arpo, is documented in Padua from 1338 to 1365; in 1365 he was called to Venice to paint frescoes in the Doge’s Palace; he was already dead by September 1370.

Among the numerous works assigned to him by sources or attributed to his heirs, the following are noteworthy: in Padua, the decorations of the Carrara palace, of which some fragments of frescoes remain (in the Accademia) and numerous panels from the ceiling of the chapel (Museum), and the frescoes of the choir of the church of the Eremitani (partially destroyed during the Second World War) executed with the help of assistants; in Bassano (Museum) a *Crucifixion*, the only signed work; a *Crucifixion* in the Fogg Museum in Cambridge (U.S.A.), etc. His most celebrated work is the fresco of *Paradise* painted in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace; its remains, much damaged by the fire of 1577 and later covered by Tintoretto’s large canvas, were detached in 1904 and placed in an adjacent room. Among the disputed attributions is that of an important polyptych, dated 1344, in the Czernin collection in Vienna (also attributed to the circle of Giusto de’ Menabuoi).

A personality of no great prominence, despite the renown he enjoyed among his contemporaries, Guariento, more than an innovator, should be regarded as an artist who personally fused the characteristics of different styles: the Byzantine elements of Venetian painting, the plastic researches of the new Giottesque culture, and a decorative linearity deriving from Gothic art, to which also belongs his taste for elaborate and overloaded compositions.

BIBL.: G. Fiocco, s. V. in *Thieme-Becker*, XV, pp. 172–73 (with previous bibliography); R. van Marle, *The development of the Italian schools of painting*, IV, The Hague 1924, p. 110; A. Moschetti, *G. pittore padovano del sec. XV*, in *Atti e memorie Accad. di Padova*, 40 (1924), p. 10; L. Coletti, *Studi sulla pittura del Trecento a Padova: G. e Semitecolo*, in *Rivista d’arte*, 12 (1930), pp. 323–80; A. Fitzgerald, *G. di Arpo*, in *Memoirs of the Amer. Acad. in Rome*, 9 (1931), p. 166; E. Sandberg Vavala, *Semitecolo and G.*, in *Art in America*, Dec. 1933, p. 3; R. Longhi, *Breve ma veridica storia di cinque secoli di pittura veneziana*, Florence 1946, pp. 7, 46; L. Coletti, *I primitivi*, III, I padani, Novara 1947, p. LIV.

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