(b Verona, c. 1442; d Verona, c. 1518). Vasari—exceptionally well informed on Veronese artists—asserted that Domenico was taught by students of the Gothic painter Stefano da Verona. His earliest signed work, a fine Virgin and Child dated 29 April 1483 (Berlin, Gemäldegal.), reveals his conversion to Andrea Mantegna’s ideas, partly as filtered through Giovanni Bellini and Francesco Benaglio. His next, the signed and dated Expulsion of the Bonacolsi from Mantua (1494; Mantua, Pal. Ducale), parallels the Venetian panoramic narratives of Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio and may owe much to Giovanni Bellini’s lost battle paintings for the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Though damaged and repainted (the distant landscape, for example, is new), this spirited narrative remains valuable both for its detailed description of 15th-century Mantua and as the most convincing large-scale Quattrocento battle-piece that survives.
Francis L. Richardson