Giovanni Maria Verdizotti


Giovanni Maria Verdizotti was a well-connected writer and artist who was born in Venice in 1525 and died there in 1600.

Life and work

As an artist, Verdizotti is mainly remembered for his friendship with Titian, whose pupil he was, and later his secretary from 1556. No painted work can be attributed with certainty to him but, judging from the prints in his "100 Moral Fables", his speciality was small landscapes with tiny figures. There is a signed pen and ink drawing by him of Cephalus and Procris, which resembles Titian's graphic style. Other drawings attributed to Verdizotti are a pen and ink Landscape with Houses and the Titian-like Study of a Tree. He probably also executed the pen and wash drawing of "A Bear Devouring a Rabbit in a Landscape", which has as motto naturam ars vincit, a work close in style to the woodcuts that illustrate his fables. Similarly, the supposed ink portrait of Titian is close to the "Cephalus and Procris".
Verdizotti's poetic work includes a translation into ottava rima of the second book of the Aeneid and a chivalric romance, Del L'Aspramonte. His most celebrated work was the "100 Moral Fables", valued as much for the beauty of his woodprints as for the verse and the interesting choice of subjects. According to Ruth Mortimer, he was probably influenced by Gabriele Faerno's Centum Fabulae, the engravings in which are considered as being by Titian and which Verdizotti may have seen in preparation. Among Verdizotti's fables, 37 of Faerno's subjects do not appear, the rejected texts dealing mainly with men and gods. His preference is for animal fables but he also added the Biblical "The Trees and the Bramble".
In 1597 Verdizotti published a prose "Lives of the Holy Fathers" in which he mentioned that he had a canonry at Castelcucco, near Treviso.

Selected published works