an Italian Renaissance painter and etcher, born in present-day Croatia, active mainly in the city of Venice. By 1540, he was well enough established in Venice that Giorgio Vasari commissioned him a large battle picture (which the Florentine author mentions in his Lives). 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".
