Guariento Padovano - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VI, p. 722

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

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

Among the numerous works assigned to him by the sources or attributed to him with certainty are the following: in Padua, the decorations of the Carrara Palace, of which several fragments of frescoes remain (in the Accademia), as well as numerous ceiling panels from the chapel (in the Museum), and the frescoes of the choir of the church of the Eremitani (partly destroyed during the Second World War), executed together with assistants; in Bassano (Museum), a Crucifix, his only signed work; a Crucifix in the Fogg Museum in Cambridge (U.S.A.), etc. His last and most celebrated work is the fresco of Paradise, painted in the Hall of the Great Council in the Doge’s Palace. Its remains, badly damaged by the fire of 1577 and subsequently covered by Tintoretto’s great canvas, were detached in 1904 and placed in a nearby 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 importance, despite the renown he enjoyed among his contemporaries, G. should be regarded less as an innovator than as an artist who personally fused the characteristics of various styles: the Byzantinism of Venetian painting, the plastic investigations of the new Giottesque culture, and a decorative linearism deriving from Gothic art, to which may also be traced the taste for complex compositions overloaded with detail.

BIBL.: G. Fiocco, s. V. in Thieme-Becker, XV, pp. 172-73 (with preceding bibliography); R. van Marle, The development of the italian schools of painting, IV, L'Aia 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 Vavalà, Semitecolo and G., in Art in America, dic. 1933, p. 3; R. Longhi, Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana, Firenze 1946, pp. 7, 46; L. Coletti, I primitivi, III, I padani, Novara 1947, p. LIV.

Nolfo di Carpegna