Giovanni Francesco Caroto, born in Verona between 1478 and 1482, would become an artist like his younger brother Giovanni. According to Vasari, he apprenticed first under Liberale da Verona, and later under Andrea Mantegna in Mantua. His earliest signed and dated work, a painting of the Madonna sewing that is now in the Galleria Estense in Modena, was produced in 1501, before his return to Verona in 1502. Beginning in 1502 Caroto is documented in Verona as "pictor"; from then on he presumably had his own workshop. Over the course of the first decade of the sixteenth century, the influence of Lombard, especially Milanese, painting from the circle around Leonardo da Vinci and Bernardino Luini became more and more significant for Caroto's work. Sojourns in Milan, and from 1514 to 1523 at the court of the counts of Monferrat in Casale Monferrato, where Caroto was also active as a medallist, provided him with knowledge of these movements. From 1523 until his death in 1555, the artist was again in Verona and its environs as a painter of altarpieces, votive images and portraits, as well as facades. In the mid-1520s Caroto's works betray a growing interest in Raphael, based on graphic reproductions of his paintings; in Giulio Romano, who was active in Mantua beginning in 1524; and in Correggio. Beginning around 1530 he painted landscapes, most of them embedded in depictions of religious or mythological subjects and thus legitimised, that reveal his encounter with Flemish landscape painting in the manner of Henri met de Bles ("il Civetta"). He typically combined landscape views reminiscent of 'worldly landscapes' from north of the Alps with figural groupings that recall works by Giulio Romano, Michelangelo or the followers of Raphael.
