Nicola Giolfino

On 3 May 1555 Nicola Giolfino handed over a drawing of Valverde, a district of Verona. The owners of a sawmill had ordered it for a lawsuit against another family over where the rainwater should drain. On 11 June a second map, made for the other side in the same case, was delivered by his son-in-law, because Giolfino had died in between. In old age he had taken up surveying, writing that God had granted him a little skill at drawing lands and places, and in 1545 he had drawn a map of the Verona territory for the government of Venice.

He came from a family of wood carvers, and from 1492 he trained with the painter Liberale da Verona. By 1502 the city's tax assessment already rated his income above Liberale's own. His figures are often small and deliberately out of proportion, his colours sharp, and he borrowed freely from German prints. Giorgio Vasari, the biographer of artists, mentions him only in passing, as a teacher of the painter Paolo Farinati. Critics such as Bernard Berenson were hard on him, and one called him a pittoruccio, a little painter. Toward the end of the 20th century scholars began to value him again.

In Verona his frescoes of Old Testament stories still line the right-hand wall of the nave in the church of Santa Maria in Organo.