Print of steel engraving titled „Caino che uccide Abele“.

Artist Andrea Schiavone.

Drawn by M. Muzzi.

Engraved by A. Marchi.

From “Galerie du Palais Pitti“, Chez Louis Bardi, Florence, 1843. Vol. IV. Tav. 97.

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". Meldolla died in Venice.

Approx. image size: 19, 4 x 16, 8/47, 2 x 32, 3 cm. Condition: good.