Pier Francesco Bissolo
Italian, active 1492 - 1554
Italian painter. At least eight signed works by Bissolo are known; one of the most important of these, the Coronation of St Catherine of Siena (1513; Venice, Accad.), is also documented with a contract. On this basis, a considerable number of other altarpieces and devotional half-lengths may be attributed to him with a reasonable degree of confidence. Bissolo is first recorded as an assistant of Giovanni Bellini at the Doge’s Palace, Venice, in 1492, and his works demonstrate a stylistic dependence on his master throughout his long life (apparently spent entirely in Venice). Individual motifs are frequently borrowed directly from Bellini, as with the God the Father of the Coronation. Hallmarks of his own manner include a softness of modelling, tending towards formlessness, and a greater sentimentality of facial expression than usual in the work of Bellini’s other followers.
In works that must belong to his later career, such as the St Euphemia with Saints and a Donor (Treviso Cathedral), Bissolo was evidently responding to the more advanced styles of younger contemporaries such as Paris Bordone and Bonifazio Veronese, without, however, abandoning the Bellinesque basis of his art. Bissolo was employed by distinguished men such as Pietro Barozzi, Bishop of Padua, and Bonino de’ Bonini, printer and canon of Treviso Cathedral. Although as late as 1545 he enjoyed sufficient professional reputation to be asked to value a picture by Lorenzo Lotto, his rather low recorded fees confirm that his contemporaries did not overrate his essentially modest talents.
Peter Humfrey. "Bissolo, Francesco." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T009043 (accessed March 22, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
Flemish, 1575 - 1632
