According to the Grove Dictionary of Art, Schiavone (also known as Andrea 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 Vasari commissioned a large battle picture (which he mentions in his Lives). Although initially much influenced by Parmigianino and Central Italian Mannerism, "he was also a strikingly daring exponent of Venetian painterly techniques," and ultimately combined both in his works, influencing Titian, Tintoretto, and 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" (Francis E, Richardson, in the Encyclopedia of Italian Renaissance & Mannerist Art, 2: pp. 1502-04 at 1503). 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 etchings are the only real equivalent in printmaking of later 16th-century Venetian painterly modes, and his technical experiments were emulated by 17th-century etchers such as Jacques Bellange, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and Rembrandt" (2: 1503-04).

Selected Bibliography: Francis E. Richardson, Andrea Schiavone (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); for his etchings see Henri Zerner et al, ed. The Illustrated Bartsch 32: Parmigianino, Master F.P., Meldolla, Schiavone, Titian, Marconi, Tintoretto, Bresciano, Franco, P. Farinati, H. Farinati, del Moro, Fontana, Valentinis (NY: Abaris, 1979).