Orlando Flacco

When Giorgio Vasari brought out the second edition of his Lives of the Artists in 1568, he praised a portrait painter from Verona and then did something he rarely bothered to do for a provincial artist. He listed the sitters, fifteen of them, among them cardinals, two bishops of Verona, members of the Medici and of the Canossa family. The painter was Orlando Flacco.

Flacco was born in Verona around 1527. Vasari says he trained with Francesco Torbido, the leading painter in the city. The Venetian writer Carlo Ridolfi later named Antonio Badile instead. He was paid in 1556 for Victories on the cloister doors of Santa Maria in Organo, painted an altarpiece for the church of Sant'Andrea in the mid-1560s, and worked for Count Mario Bevilacqua, a Veronese collector who also asked his opinion on pictures.

The portraits have been harder to keep hold of than the praise. The half-length of an old woman now in the Sala di Saturno at Palazzo Pitti carried Titian's name for generations, then Palma il Vecchio's, then Francesco Bassano's, before the art historian Federico Zeri proposed Flacco in the 1970s and a cleaning made that reading easier to accept. Flacco's own death is dated by a letter of Bevilacqua's, written on 11 February 1593, which speaks of him as already gone.