Giovanni Antonio de Pordenone

Giovanni Antonio de Pordenone , c.1484-1539, Venetian painter. His real name was Giovanni Antonio de Sacchis. He studied in Venice and probably in Rome c.1515. Strong elements of Raphael and Michelangelo are present in his works at the churches of Treviso, Cortemaggiore, Piacenza, and Terlizzi. In Venice his services were in great demand for the decorating of Venetian palaces. Most of his Venetian frescoes have perished. Some of his paintings are in the National Gallery, London; the Brera, Milan; the Philadelphia Museum; and in Vienna.

Bibliography: See study by C. E. Cohen (2 vol., 1997).

Pordenone ( Giovanni Antonio de Sacchis) (b Pordenone, ?c.1483; d Ferrara, ?13 Jan. 1539). Italian painter, named after the town of his birth, near Venice, and active in various parts of northern Italy. After working in a provincial style at the very start of his career (his master is unknown and Vasari says he was self-taught), by the beginning of the second decade of the 16th century he had come close to the contemporary Venetian (specifically Giorgionesque) manner of painting. In the second half of the decade, however, he was in central Italy, and his style changed under the impact particularly of Michelangelo, acquiring great weight and solidity. Pordenone was influenced also by Mantegna's illusionism and by German prints, and the style he forged from these diverse influences was highly distinctive and original. He always retained something of provincial uncouthness—at times vulgarity—but he was, in Vasari's words, ‘very rich in invention…bold and resolute’, and he excelled at dramatic spatial effects. These qualities are seen at their most forceful in his fresco of the Crucifixion (1520–1) in Cremona Cathedral; the densely packed, bizarrely expressive figures are seen as if on a stage through a painted proscenium arch and they lunge violently out into the spectator's space. From 1527 Pordenone lived mainly in Venice and in the 1530s he was the most serious rival there to Titian. His major works in Venice have been destroyed, however. In the year before his death he moved to Ferrara to design tapestries for Ercole II d'Este.

Pordenone ( Giovanni Antonio de Sacchis) (c.1483?–1539). Italian painter, named after the town of his birth, Pordenone, near Venice, and active in various parts of northern Italy. After working in a provincial style at the very start of his career (his master is unknown and Vasari says he was self-taught), by the beginning of the second decade of the 16th century he had come close to the contemporary Venetian (specifically Giorgionesque) manner of painting. In the second half of the decade, however, he was in central Italy, and his style changed under the impact particularly of Michelangelo, acquiring great weight and solidity. Pordenone was influenced also by the illusionism of Mantegna and by German prints, and the style he forged from these diverse influences was highly distinctive and original. He always retained something of provincial uncouthness—at times vulgarity—but he was, in Vasari's words, ‘very rich in invention…bold and resolute’, and he excelled at dramatic spatial effects. These qualities are seen at their most forceful in his fresco of the Crucifixion (1520–1) in Cremona Cathedral; the densely packed, bizarrely expressive figures are seen as if on a stage through a painted proscenium arch and they lunge violently out into the spectator's space. From 1527 Pordenone lived mainly in Venice and in the 1530s he was the most serious rival to Titian. His major works in Venice have been destroyed, however. He died in Ferrara, where he had gone to design tapestries for Ercole II d' Este.