Stefano da Verona

An unusual number of his drawings came through, which for a painter working in Italy around 1400 is close to luck, since workshop sheets were tools and were normally used up. His are in the Louvre, the Albertina in Vienna and the Uffizi, pen studies of heads, hands and heavy drapery, and they are why he is counted among the finest draughtsmen of his generation. An old tradition turned that reputation into a teaching claim and made the Veronese medallist Pisanello his pupil. Scholars now doubt it. The two men were in Verona in the same years and knew each other's work.

Where he came from is less clear. Documents name his father as a Giovanni de Herbosio, most probably the French painter Jean d'Arbois, who had worked for Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, before entering the service of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the ruler of Milan. Stefano was likely trained in Pavia among the Visconti manuscript illuminators, which would account for the miniaturist's precision in everything he painted. He does not appear in Verona before 1425, by which time the city had passed under Venetian rule.

Most of the Veronese work is gone or damaged. A fresco of the Madonna with Saint Christopher and angels was detached from its wall and is now in the Castelvecchio museum, and a seated Saint Augustine survives in the church of Sant'Eufemia. He was last documented in 1438 and probably died about then, in his sixties. He signed himself simply Stefanus, and older local writers called him Stefano da Zevio, after a town down the Adige from Verona, so both names still follow him.