Gianfrancesco da Tolmezzo

Gianfrancesco da Tolmezzo worked where he was from: the mountains and villages of Friuli, in Italy's far northeast, around the turn of the 16th century. He is counted among the founders of the so-called Tolmezzo school, the first real current of local painting in that corner of the country.

Almost everything we can securely give him is fresco, painted straight onto church walls rather than sold as movable panels, which is one reason his name travelled so little. The clearest survivals are the story cycles in the parish church at Provesano, a small village on the Friulian plain. His figures carry the sharp, linear drawing of Andrea Mantegna, the Paduan master whose prints and paintings shaped a whole generation across the northeast.

He was born in the mountain town of Socchieve and seems to have died around 1510.