Giovanni Caroto

Around 1540 a parcel went from Verona to Bologna, where the painter Giorgio Vasari, later the biographer of Italy's artists, was decorating the refectory of the monastery of San Michele in Bosco. Inside was a newly printed book on the antiquities of Verona by the humanist Torello Saraina. Its drawings of the Roman ruins, the ground plans, the triumphal arches and the Arena, the city's amphitheatre, were by the man who sent it, Giovanni Caroto. He added a portrait of a Veronese monk who had twice led the Olivetan order, and Vasari used it in one of his panels and kept it in his house in Florence.

Giovanni was the younger brother of the painter Giovanni Francesco Caroto. He was born around 1488 and died in the mid-1560s. Vasari judged that he painted with less renown than his brother, and the ruins seem to have held him more. In 1560 he republished his drawings in Italian under his own name, with a woodcut portrait of himself. Vasari also calls him the first teacher of the young Paolo Veronese, a role later writers gave to Antonio Badile, and says he died glad to see his pupils well regarded.