Gregorio Lazzarini
1657–1730 · Republic of Venice · Baroque, Venetian school
The story
In 1710 a fourteen-year-old boy named Giambattista Tiepolo walked into a Venetian workshop to begin his training. The master who took him in was Gregorio Lazzarini, then one of the most successful painters in the city and, by wide agreement, its most sought-after teacher.
Lazzarini had come up the hard way. Born in Venice in 1657, the son of a barber, he trained under a run of local masters and joined the painters' guild in 1687. His own canvases, mythological and religious scenes and portraits, were prized in his day, but it was his classroom that shaped Venetian painting for the next generation. A contemporary biographer, Vincenzo da Canal, wrote that the young who wanted to get ahead chose Lazzarini as their master. He was remembered as patient, and he pushed his pupils to study the great Venetians of the 16th century.
He kept working in Venice until at least 1715 and died in 1730. Tiepolo, by then in his thirties, had already left the city for the fresco commissions on the mainland that would make his name.
