Giovanni Battista Zelotti

1526 – 1578

Italian painter. He is called Battista da Verona by Vasari, and also known as Battista Farinati. He was trained with Paolo Veronese in the workshop of Antonio Badile in Verona. Perhaps he trained also with his uncle Paolo Farinati. Much of Zelotti's work was executed for prestigious villas and palazzi in and near Vicenza. He was a contemporary of Paolo Veronese and shared work in Villa Soranza near Castelfranco (1551); in the ceiling of the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci in the Doge's Palace of Venice (1553-54); in the Biblioteca Marciana (1556-57), and Palazzo Trevisan (1557) in Murano. Zelotti came to embody the Veronese tradition in the mainland, decorating at Villa Obizzi at Catajo near Padua. Also worked in Mantua for the Gonzaga family. Along with Bernardino India and Battista Franco, he helped fresco the Palladian house called La Malcontenta or Villa Foscari. Although works of uncertain attribution have been assigned traditionally to Veronese, owing to his greater fame, a clearer picture of the distinctions between the two artists during their early years has emerged in the later 20th century.

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