Lazzaro Bastiani

Lazzaro Bastiani came from Padua to Venice around 1450, just as the Bellini family was turning the city into one of the great painting centres of Europe. He was never their pupil. He worked alongside them as an equal, and in 1462 the records show him paid at the same rate as Giovanni Bellini, the finest Venetian painter of the age.

For half a century he was everywhere in Venetian art without ever becoming its star. He painted altarpieces for the scuole, the city's charitable brotherhoods, and in 1480 he worked with Gentile Bellini on decorations for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. His real mark was left through a student: the young Vittore Carpaccio, whose storytelling processions would soon outshine his teacher, trained in his workshop. In 1508 the two were called together to value the new frescoes Giorgione had painted on the German merchants' warehouse.