**LIBERALE** of VERONA. - L. (Liberale) son of Jacopo dalla Biava, or *a Blavo*, illuminator and painter, born in Verona around 1445 and died there between 1526 and 1529. He is recorded as active between February 1467 and the end of 1469 in Siena, at Monte Oliveto, between 1470 and 1474 in Siena itself, in the Duomo, leaving numerous graduals, now preserved in the duomo of Chiusi and in the Piccolomini Library of Siena.
He is present in Tuscany in 1476, but from 1488 he is again in Verona, where in the following years he executes frescoes in S. Anastasia (1490), in S. Lorenzo, in S. Vitale, in S. Fermo, in the Duomo, and in private palaces. A stay in Venice, perhaps prior to his journey to Tuscany, can be inferred from the background of the *S. Sebastian* in the Brera, in which the Grand Canal is faithfully reproduced. The saint is also inspired by the *Adam* of Rizzo in the Doge's Palace. He must have learned the practice of painting from Girolamo da Cremona, but his continuous travels allowed him to become acquainted with the Pollaiuolo, Mantegna, the Venetians, and the northern artists. In his illuminations, his exuberant temperament, influenced by Sienese art, is expressed in swollen linear rhythms of almost Baroque fantasy. The panels, such as the predella of the *Archbishop* of Verona, the *Adoration of the Magi* in the Duomo, the splendid frescoes of the Bonaveri Chapel in S. Anastasia, the *S. Sebastian* of Berlin, the *Pietà* of Munich, and the *S. John the Evangelist* of Philadelphia, show him persistently devoted to plastic research, although he prefers «to strike figures in metal rather than to paint them» (Fiocco). He does not free himself from Mantegnesque and Paduan expressionism, yet through the use of a soft and pasty color, as in the *Death of Dido* in London, he achieves a brilliant and poetic union of expression and decoration. - See pl. LXXIX.
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