Giovanni Battista Zelotti

Fresco from Villa Emo, west wall of the hall.

Giovanni Battista Zelotti (Italian pronunciation: [dʒambatˈtista dzeˈlɔtti], 1526 – 28 August 1578) was an Italian painter of the late Renaissance, active in Venice and her mainland territories.

He appears to have been born in Verona,^[1] then part of the Venetian mainland, and trained with Antonio Badile and Domenico Riccio, as well as perhaps Titian. Bernasconi claims he trained with his uncle Paolo Farinati. He is called Battista da Verona by Vasari, and was also known as Battista Farinati.

He was a contemporary of Paolo Veronese and shared work in the Villa Soranza near Castelfranco (1551) and at Venice: the ceiling of the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci in the Doge's Palace (1553-4); the Biblioteca Marciana (1556-7), and the Palazzo Trevisan (1557) on Murano.

Zelotti came to embody the Veronese tradition on the mainland. He frescoed villas designed by Andrea Palladio, notably Villa Emo and Villa Foscari, where he worked with Bernardino India and Battista Franco: the exact number of Palladian villas he frescoed is not known. With the painter Giovanni Antonio Fasolo he worked also at Villa Caldogno (about 1570) and at Palazzo Porto Colleoni Thiene. In the 1570s he decorated the castle of the Obizzi family at Battaglia Terme with 40 frescoes.^[2] He also worked in Mantua for the house of Gonzaga.

See also

• Giovanni Antonio Fasolo
• Palladian Villas of the Veneto

References

1. Boni, Filippo de' (1852). Biografia degli artisti ovvero dizionario della vita e delle opere dei pittori, degli scultori, degli intagliatori, dei tipografi e dei musici di ogni nazione che fiorirono da'tempi più remoti sino á nostri giorni. Seconda Edizione.. Venice; Googlebooks: Presso Andrea Santini e Figlio. p. 1103.
2. Recently the frescoes at Castello del Catajo have been open to the public (see Out of the Shadows, a Camelot of Italian Knights and Daring Deeds, New York Times, March 13, 2008, Arts section article, by Elisabetta Povoledo).

• Freedberg, Sydney J. (1993). Pelican History of Art, ed. Painting in Italy, 1500-1600. Penguin Books. pp. 559–560.
• Bernasconi, Cesare (1864). Studi sopra la storia della pittura italiana dei secoli xiv e xv e della scuola pittorica veronese dai medi tempi fino tutto il secolo xviii. Googlebooks. pp. 333–334.

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