Bernardino India

Bernardino India (1528–1590) was an Italian painter of the late Renaissance, born and mainly active in Verona.

Life Born in Verona in 1528, his widowed mother married again in 1545 and Bernardino was then entrusted to his maternal grandparents, Caterina and Bernardino India, and came to take their surname. He is said to have trained with Domenico Riccio.

Between 1550 and 1555, he worked with Eliodoro Forbicini on two rooms on the ground floor of the Palazzo Canossa in Verona, decorating them with Olympic divinities and grotesques, an extravagant style of ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered at Rome at the end of the fifteenth century and subsequently imitated. In 1552, India moved to Vicenza to decorate the palace that Marcantonio Thiene had just had built by Andrea Palladio.

He decorated Palladian villas such as Villa Pojana, Villa Foscari (also known as La Malcontenta) where Giovanni Battista Zelotti also worked. He worked on the small octagonal ceiling of the Palazzo Dalla Torre in Verona. In 1584, he completed a Conversion of Saint Paul for Santi Nazaro e Celso.

India died in Verona in 1590.