Vincenzo Catena

The first solid trace of Vincenzo Catena survives on the back of another man's painting. On the reverse of Giorgione's small portrait known as Laura, dated 1506 and now in Vienna, a note records that the picture was made by Giorgione, the colleague of Master Vincenzo Catena. That single sentence ties an otherwise shadowy Venetian to the most elusive painter of his generation.

Catena was comfortably off and moved among Venice's humanist scholars, including the poet and future cardinal Pietro Bembo, which is probably how he fell in with Giorgione in the first place. His early pictures, calm Madonnas and steady portraits, look back to the older master Giovanni Bellini rather than to Giorgione's soft, dreamlike manner. Only in the years after Giorgione died young in 1510 did that gentler light begin to seep into Catena's own work.

He kept painting quietly in Venice until his death in 1531, leaving a will that remembered friends and fellow artists. His Saint Jerome in his study, now in London, shows the ordered interiors he did best, a scholar at his desk while a lion dozes on the tiled floor.