Marcantonio Bassetti

1588 – 1630

Italian painter. He was a pupil of Felice Brusasorci, but he soon moved to Venice, where he studied the art of Jacopo Tintoretto in particular, but also that of Jacopo Bassano and of Veronese, whose works he copied in chiaroscuro drawings (mainly Windsor Castle, Royal Library) similar to those of Domenico Tintoretto. Bassetti's early painted Portrait of a Man with a Glove (Verona, Castelvecchio) is essentially Venetian, close to the art of Bassano; his St Peter and St Andrew (both Moruri, S Zeno), both unrefined, rustic works, are similar in style and must also be rare examples of his early paintings. By 1616 Bassetti (like many other north Italian artists) had settled in Rome, then the centre of artistic experimentation in Italy. Having absorbed a form of Caravaggism he returned to Verona, where in the paintings of his last decade he attempted, not entirely successfully, to fuse the directness of contemporary Roman painting with the monumental compositions of the Venetian High Renaissance.

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