Biography

Italian painter. He was the leading painter of his time in Padua and is first recorded there as a master in 1338. The origin of his eclectic but highly distinctive style is not to be explained in terms of the influence of an ill-defined regional Byzantinism, as posited in older accounts, but rather as an alert and discriminating synthesis of trends current in the Veneto following visits to the area by such artists as Giotto and Giovanni Pisano. Guariento’s style combines elements obviously drawn from Giotto’s work in Padua and elsewhere with a more overtly Gothic sense of line and rhythm and a dramatic approach to narrative, occasionally verging on caricature.