Andrea Meldolla

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Andrea Meldolla (Zara, c.1510-1515 - Venice, 1563) was an Italian Renaissance etcher and painter from today's Croatia.

Meldolla was the son of the Italian commander of a garrison post near Zara (Italian name for today's Zadar), Dalmatia, called Schiavone (the Slavonian). The painters family came from a small town Meldolla close to the city of Forli in Romagna. According to the Grove Dictionary of Art, Meldolla was born in Zara in Dalmatia and trained either in Zara or in Venice. He worked in fresco, panel painting, and etching (teaching himself to etch by working initially from drawings by Parmigianino). By 1540, he was well enough established in Venice that Giorgio Vasari commissioned him a large battle picture (which Vasari mentions in his Lives). Although initially much influenced by Parmigianino and Italian Mannerism, "he was also a strikingly daring exponent of Venetian painting techniques," and ultimately combined both in his works, influencing Titian, Tintoretto, and Jacopo Bassano among others. His works "shocked some contemporaries and stimulated others." By the 1550s, he had achieved a new synthesis of Raphael and Titian's compositional elements with his own interest in atmosphere, effecting a "fusion of form with a dense atmosphere in a pictorial fabric whose elements tend to lose their separate indenties" . Richardson also insists on his importance as an etcher: "In etching he was similarly innovative. His technique was unlike that of any contemporary: unsystematically he used dense webs of light, fine, multidirectional hatching to create a tonal continuum embracing form, light, shadow, and air. His etcings are the only real equivalent in printmaking of later 16th-century Venetian painting modes, and his technical experiments were emulated by 17th-century etchers such as Jacques Bellange, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Rembrandt".

Name

In Croatia, he is known as Andrija Medulić. This is a product of the 19th century Illyrian movement-era historian Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski's innaccurate analysis of archive documents. However, the name has remained in this form within Croatia.

Reference

Francis E. Richardson, Andrea Schiavone (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1980);
Francis E, Richardson, in the Encyclopedia of Italian Renaissance & Mannerist Art, 2: pp. 1502-04 at 1503