Giovanni Battista Zelotti

In October 1556 the procurators of San Marco, the officials in charge of Venice's new public library, paid Giovanni Battista Zelotti a first instalment for three painted roundels on the ceiling of its great hall. Two of them survive. Among the other painters on that ceiling was Paolo Veronese, a fellow Veronese of about his age. The two had already worked side by side, in 1551 at Villa Soranzo near Castelfranco and in 1553 in the Doge's Palace, so closely that their hands are still hard to tell apart.

In 1558 Zelotti left Venice and made his career on the mainland, decorating country houses and monasteries. He painted in villas designed by Andrea Palladio, worked on the dome and the library of the abbey of Praglia near Padua, and filled the Obizzi family's castle, the Catajo, with a cycle of 40 scenes in their honour. Many of those walls are lost, and some of his work was long credited to Veronese, which is why his name came back so late. His last post was in Mantua, as superintendent of buildings for Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga, and he died there on 28 August 1578.