Luigi Benfatto

When Paolo Veronese, the master of Venetian pageant-painting, ran his large busy workshop, some of the labour fell to his own relatives. One of them was his nephew Luigi Benfatto, born in Verona around 1551, who trained under him and absorbed his crowded, silvery style so thoroughly that his pictures were often taken for the uncle's.

In Venice he went by Alvise dal Friso, Alvise being the local form of Luigi, and he appears in the city's painters' guild from 1584 to 1608. He filled churches with altarpieces in the Veronese manner and passed the tradition on to a pupil of his own, Maffeo Verona.

He died in Venice in 1611. Among his surviving works is a Resurrection of Christ, a subject that let him deploy the swirling, upward-tumbling crowds he had first learned to paint in his uncle's shop.