SCHIAVONE, ANDREA MELDOLLA, called Io. – Painter and engraver, born in Zara in the early sixteenth century, died in Venice in 1563.
The date of his birth is uncertain, having been placed by Ridolfi in 1522, but various indications suggest bringing it forward by approximately twenty years. Having gone to Venice as a young man, he was often obliged to adapt himself to humble collaborative work. He decorated numerous palace façades with frescoes, all now disappeared, and distinguished himself above all as a painter of cassoni. In his engravings he faithfully reflected Parmigianino’s fantastic world and compositional taste, making a notable contribution to the diffusion of Mannerism in Venice. In his paintings he was influenced above all by Bonifacio and Tiziano, producing an individual interpretation of Mannerism with a lively sense of macchia, a free and disdainful brushstroke, and solutions in the treatment of light that anticipate those of Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano. Among his finest works are the Pietà in Dresden, the decoration of the organ at the Carmini in Venice, and an Annunciation in S. Pietro at Belluno; less successful are the paintings in which an accentuated Parmigianinesque Mannerism leads to a superficial quest for effects: Adoration of the Magi in the Ambrosiana, Fall of St. Paul at the Querini Stampalia in Venice.
Particularly characteristic and numerous are the decorations of cassoni, in which, with freshness of invention and with a taste that is alternately Bonifacesque, Mannerist, or even pre-Seicento, he represented mythological and sacred scenes filled with delightful details: works in Venice (the Accademia and the Brass collection), Vienna, Turin, Hampton Court, Dublin, etc.