LIBERALE DA VERONA. - L. was the son of Jacopo dalla Biava, or a Biavo, an illuminator and painter, born in Verona around 1445 and died there between 1526 and 1529. He is known to have been active between February 1467 and the end of 1469 near Siena, at Monte Oliveto, and between 1470 and 1474 in Siena itself, in the Cathedral, leaving numerous graduals, today preserved in the cathedral of Chiusi and in the Piccolomini Library in Siena.
He was present in Tuscany in 1476, but from 1488 he appears again in Verona, where, in the following years, he executed frescoes in S. Anastasia (1490), in S. Lorenzo, in S. Vitale, in S. Fermo, in the Cathedral and in private palaces. A stay in Venice, perhaps preceding his journey to Tuscany, can be inferred from the background of the S. Sebastian of Brera, in which the Grand Canal is faithfully reproduced. The Saint too is 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 continual travels gave him the opportunity to become acquainted with the Pollaiuolo, Mantegna, the Venetians and the northerners. In the miniatures his exuberant temperament unfolds, through Sienese influence, in swelling linear rhythms of an almost baroque fantasy. The panels, such as the predella of the Archbishop's Palace of Verona, the Adoration of the Magi in the Cathedral, the splendid frescoes of the Bonaveri Chapel in S. Anastasia, the S. Sebastian of Berlin, the Pietà of Munich, the St. John the Evangelist of Philadelphia show him tenaciously devoted to plastic research, although he prefers «to emboss the figures in metal rather than paint them» (Fiocco). He does not therefore free himself from Mantuan and Paduan expressionism, even though by means of a soft and pasty color, as in the Death of Dido in London, he arrives at an ingenious and poetic union of expression and decoration. - See pl. LXXIX.
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