Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (c. 1480 – after 1548) was born in Brescia, and little is known of his early years. By 1506 he was in Parma and by 1508 a member of the Florentine painters' guild. He settled in Venice before 1521 and was based there for most of his career, with commissions for Pesaro, Verona, Brescia and the Duke of Milan. In 1548 he is recorded as still living in Venice, by then very old. He painted mostly religious subjects, with a few portraits, in a sober, realist manner that joins Venetian colour to Lombard modelling. He preferred a single figure or a few figures in a quiet setting, and was known in his lifetime for night scenes: his Saint Matthew and the Angel prefigures Caravaggio. Only about forty of his paintings are known. After his death he was almost entirely forgotten for three centuries, and many of his pictures were assigned to better-known artists, especially Giorgione, until his work was rediscovered in the nineteenth century. Here: Adoration of the Shepherds.