Marco Basaiti

Very little is known about Marco Basaiti. A guild ledger from 1530 records him in Venice as a painter of figures, and beyond his signatures on panels there is almost no paper trail. Even his name is spelled a dozen ways across the records.

What survives is the work. Basaiti painted in Venice in the decades around 1500, in the long shadow of Giovanni Bellini, the city's leading master, and so close to him in manner that some of Bellini's own paintings were once given to Basaiti by mistake. His great commission, the Calling of the Sons of Zebedee of 1510, shows Christ calling two fishermen from their nets against a wide, luminous landscape of water and distant hills, the kind of deep background Venetian painters were learning to love.

That taste for landscape sharpened after Albrecht Dürer, the German master, visited Venice around 1505. Basaiti's backgrounds grew broader and more detailed, until the figures came to share the panel with the world behind them.