Venetian school

Venetian school

Renaissance artists of Venice whose work is characterized by a love of light and colour. Jacopo Bellini was the first in this influential line, followed by his son Gentile Bellini, the instructor of Venice's great High Renaissance painters, including Giorgione and Titian. In due course Titian became the dominant force in Venetian painting, and his rich colours and painterly technique were widely imitated. Other 16th-century masters included Veronese, known for his vast, brilliantly coloured, pageantlike canvases, and Tintoretto, who combined the Mannerists' rapidly receding diagonals and dramatic foreshortenings with the Venetian love of light as a means of defining form and heightening drama. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the last important Venetian figure painter and one of the greatest artists of the Rococo period.