Giovanni Rosso (Giovanni da Mel)

He was born in 1480 in Pieve di Cadore, the small town high in the Dolomites that a few years later would also give the world Titian, the giant of Venetian painting. Giovanni Rosso, known as Giovanni da Mel after the town of Mel in the hills near Belluno, took the quieter road out of that valley. While Titian went on to conquer Venice, Giovanni stayed in the mountains, running a family workshop and painting frescoes for the local churches.

Almost everything he made was painted straight onto wall plaster, in the quick, unforgiving fresco technique handed down in his family. The one work that survives on canvas is an altarpiece he made late in life for the church at Trichiana, near Belluno. Restorers who studied it recently found that he had used his fresco pigments and habits even here, on cloth, as if he had never quite left the wall behind.