Girolamo Mocetto

Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1500/05), engraving after Mantegna. Girolamo Mocetto (c. 1470 in Murano – after 1531 in Venice, Active 1490 – 1530) was an Italian Renaissance painter, engraver, and stained glass designer. He was heavily influenced by Domenico Morone, Giovanni Bellini, Bartolomeo Montagna, Cima da Conegliano, and especially Andrea Mantegna. He is most important as an engraver, and his engravings of the compositions of others are his most successful prints.

Life Mocetto's family were glass painters. and his grandfather's 1445 marriage and assuming that Mocetto and his father each married at age 20-25. St Theodore and SS John and Paul, stained glass panels from Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, c. 1515

Work None of Mocetto's works have been dated to before 1490, and the only clearly datable ones are illustrations, with no figures, in a book published in 1514, so little use in establishing a chronology of his style.

While Mocetto's paintings are "derivative in form and middling, at best, in quality," His style varies little: it is "undisciplined" and even "naïve", marked by a loose and free application of dense cross hatching. In an impression in the British Museum he "pressed the ink on with a cloth to produce a patterned surface tone". A group of engravings based on designs by Mantegna and his circle appear to precede a group using his own designs, and finally comes a group copying or reflecting the style of Giovanni Bellini. There are indications that, unlike other prints by Mantegna's circle after his designs, Mocetto's prints were not produced under the supervision of the master.

Of Mocetto's work in stained glass, his c.1515 panels for the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo are considered the most successful.