Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone (Giovanni Antonio de Sacchis) (c.1483-1539)

• Was an Italian Mannerist painter.
• He painted in several cities in northern Italy "with speed, vigor, and deliberate coarseness of expression and execution—intended to shock".
• He appears to have visited Rome, and learnt from its High Renaissance masterpieces.
• A number of fresco cycles survive, for example part of one at Cremona Cathedral, where his Passion scenes have a violence hardly repeated until Goya.
• Another cycle was at the Scuola Grande della Carità in Venice, now the Gallerie dell'Accademia, where he worked with the young Tintoretto.
• His life was as energetic and restless as his art.
• He married three times, and was accused in court of hiring criminals to kill his brother to avoid sharing their inheritance.
• Titian and Pordenone were rivals in his last decade and gossip even claimed that his death was suspicious.
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