Giorgio Schiavone
1504 · Republic of Venice · Renaissance, Dalmatian school
The story
In 1467 the Paduan painter Francesco Squarcione, who ran a large teaching workshop, went to law to recover money and drawings from a former assistant. To act for him in Dalmatia he named the sculptor and architect Juraj Dalmatinac, the builder of Šibenik cathedral. The assistant was Juraj's own son-in-law.
He was Juraj Ćulinović, born in Skradin near Šibenik, then a Venetian town, and known in Italy as Giorgio Schiavone, the Slav. He had gone to Padua in 1456 under contract to Squarcione and left a few years later, the master said, without settling his debt and with drawings from the shop. By 1462 he was working in Zadar, and in 1463 he married Juraj's daughter Jelena in Šibenik. Squarcione was never repaid.
The Šibenik records say little about painting. They show him buying land, trading in wine and oil, and selling wool, wax and cheese, and one polyptych he had contracted for the cathedral was finished by another painter. He died in Šibenik on 6 December 1504 and was buried in the cathedral.
