Palma il Giovane

Iacopo Negretti (1548/50 – 14 October 1628), best known as Jacopo or Giacomo Palma il Giovane or simply Palma Giovane ("Young Palma"), was an Italian painter from Venice and a notable exponent of the Venetian school. After Tintoretto's death (1594), Palma became Venice's dominant artist perpetuating his style. Outside Venice, he received numerous commissions in the area of Bergamo, then part of the Venetian Domini di Terraferma, and in Central Europe, most prominently from the connoisseur emperor Rudolph II in Prague. Palma was born in Venice. Born into a family of painters, he was the great-nephew of the painter Palma Vecchio ("Old Palma") and the son of Antonio Nigreti (1510/15–1575/85), a minor painter who was himself the pupil of the elder Palma's workshop foreman Bonifacio de' Pitati and who after Bonifazio's death (1553) inherited Bonifacio's shop and clientele; the younger Palma seems to have polished his style making copies after Titian. In 1567 Guidobaldo II della Rovere, duke of Urbino, recognized Palma's talents, supporting him for four years and sending him to Rome, where he remained until about 1572. Shedding most remnants of Roman manner after his return to Venice, Palma adopted the inescapable models and mannerisms of Tintoretto. His early biographers assert that he found a place in the ageing Titian's workshop; when the master died, Palma stepped in to finish his last work, the Pietà in the Accademia, Venice. Palma's first major public commission arrived after a 1577 fire in the Doge's Palace: three scenes in its grand council hall. By the mid-1580s he had digested Tintoretto's versatile figure postures and Titian's thick surfaces, emphasis on light, and loose brushstroke. In Palma Giovane's output, Freedberg detects also "an occasional discursive opulence à la Veronese; and inclinations towards descriptive naturalism à la Bassano." Rejecting Mannerism in the 1580s, he embraced a reformist naturalism. He varied the ingeniously synthesised amalgam according to subject matter and patrons' own eclectic and conservative tastes, with "virtuoso skill and a facile intelligence".