Andrea Meldolla (Croatian: Andrija Medulić), also known as Andrea Schiavone or Andrea Lo Schiavone (c. 1510/1515-1563) was an Italian Renaissance painter* and etcher, born in present-day Croatia, active mainly in the city of Venice.
Meldolla was born in the Venetian-ruled city of Zara in Dalmatia, now Zadar in Croatia, the son of a garrison commander of a post nearby. His family was originally from the small town of Meldola, close to the city of Forlì in Romagna.
He trained either in Zara or in Venice. Lomazzo stated, in a book of 1584, that he was a pupil of Parmigianino*, but this has been doubted. There are unproven claims that he trained with Bonifazio de Pitati.
He worked in fresco, panel painting, and etching (teaching himself to etch by working initially from drawings by Parmigianino*).
By 1540, he was well enough established in Venice that Giorgio Vasari* commissioned him a large battle picture (which the Florentine author mentions in his Lives).
Although initially much influenced by Parmigianino* and Italian Mannerism*, "he was also a strikingly daring exponent of Venetian painting techniques", and ultimately combined both in his works, influencing Titian*, Tintoretto*, and Jacopo Bassano among others.
His works "shocked some contemporaries and stimulated others".
By the 1550s, he had achieved a new synthesis of Raphael* and Titian's compositional elements with his own interest in atmosphere, effecting a "fusion of form with a dense atmosphere in a pictorial fabric whose elements tend to lose their separate indenties".
In Painting in Italy, 1500-1600, Freedberg describes Meldolla as well adapted to the Mannerist vocabulary, and that while he was:
"able to invent a Venetian Maniera...he was strangely uncreative in the more ordinary workings of artistic invention".
Later in the 1550s, "occasionally, the sensibility - too receptive, almost feminine - that inclined Schiavone towards imitation brought him to the verge of echo of the larger personality (Titian)".
Other works have attributions disputed between him and Tintoretto*.
Few of his paintings are documented; this may be because, as Vasari states, he mostly worked for private client.
Richardson also insists on his importance as an etcher:
"In etching he was similarly innovative. His technique was unlike that of any contemporary: unsystematically he used dense webs of light, fine, multidirectional hatching to create a tonal continuum embracing form, light, shadow, and air. His etchings are the only real equivalent in printmaking of later 16th-century Venetian painting modes, and his technical experiments were emulated by 17th-century etchers such as Jacques Bellange, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Rembrandt".
Meldolla died in Venice. | © Wikipedia
Andrea Schiavone (Andrea Meldolla detto Schiavone) - Pittore e incisore, nato a Zara ai primissimi del '500, morto a Venezia il 1° dicembre 1563.
Il Carlo Ridolfi (1594-1658) - pittore e scrittore Italiano, ricordato soprattutto per aver scritto una raccolta di biografie di pittori veneti "Le Maraviglie dell'arte", 1648 - lo dipinge come un autodidatta, ammiratore specialmente del Parmigianino* di cui si esercitava a copiare i disegni e sul cui stile eseguì poi varie incisioni.
Sembra però che il Ridolfi, descrivendo lo Schiavone costretto ad umili opere perché poco apprezzato dai contemporanei, mentre altre testimonianze (Vasari*, Paolo Pino, ecc.) farebbero credere altrimenti, abbia confuso il ricordo del Meldolla con quello d'altro pittore Schiavone, forse Andrea di Nicolò da Curzola.
Lavorò molto a fresco su facciate di palazzi veneziani, ma nulla ne è rimasto; le poche tracce superstiti sulle pareti del castello di Schiavone Salvatore dei conti Collalto furono distrutte dalla guerra nel 1918, ma restano suoi quadri a:
- Venezia - libreria di Schiavone Marco, quadreria Querini-Stampalia, collezione Donà Dalle Rose, galleria Giovanelli, Pinacoteca Manfrediniana al Seminario patriarcale, chiese di Schiavone Cassiano, Schiavone Rocco, Schiavone Sebastiano, Schiavone Giacomo dell'Orio, Carmini ecc.,
- Napoli - Museo Nazionale,
- Londra - Bridgewater House; Hampton Court, National Gallery,
- Parigi - Louvre,
- Berlino - Gemälde Galerie,
- Vienna,
- Dresda,
- Monaco ecc.
Improvvisatore facile e sciolto, esagerò i modi tintoretteschi, accostandosi, nelle proporzioni e nei tipi delle figure, al Parmigianino*.
Predilesse i soggetti romantici messi in voga dall'arte giorgionesca e dai suoi seguaci, e perciò fu facile spesso l'attribuzione d'opere dello Schiavone al Giorgione*.
Ora non sorge più dubbio sull'identità dell'incisore Meldolla col pittore, che rivela in questo campo sicura e abile tecnica. | © Treccani, L'Enciclopedia degli Italiani
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